GENEVA: UN human rights chief Navi Pillay on Tuesday urged India to ensure that perpetrators of caste-based sexual attacks do not escape justice.

“Women from stigmatised castes suffer the double assault of caste-based and gender-based discrimination,” Pillay said on the sidelines of a session of the UN Human Rights Council.

“And all too often abuses of their rights are committed with complete impunity,” she said.

“Such impunity must end,” said Pillay, a South African with Indian roots.

India has been trying to overcome its reputation for violence against women, but public outrage was reignited by the deaths last month of two girls, aged 12 and 14, who were gang-raped and lynched in their impoverished village in the state of Uttar Pradesh.

The girls’ families refused to cut their bodies down from a tree in protest at alleged police inaction, which they said was because they were from a lower caste.

Last week, a woman said she had been gang-raped by four officers at a police station in the same state, and police said they were also investigating the death of a nineteen-year-old found hanging from a tree.

Published in Dawn, June 18th, 2014