Mar
11
2005 Country Report on Human Rights in India
March 11, 2006 | Comments Off on 2005 Country Report on Human Rights in India
The US Department of State has released its 2005 Country Report on Human Rights Practices for India. In the report, the Department of State cites numerous human rights abuses that occur in India, including: extrajudicial killings, torture and rape by police and security forces, and prolonged detention. It also states its findings regarding developments in Punjab human rights cases in the last year.
The Department of State reports that Indian police officials continue to routinely commit human rights violations: “Police routinely resorted to arbitrary and incommunicado detention, denied detainees access to lawyers and medical attention, and used torture or ill treatment to extract confessions.” These abuses often go unpunished, despite India’s numerous laws protecting human rights.
The lack of firm accountability permeated the government and security forces, creating an atmosphere in which human rights violations often went unpunished. Although the country has numerous laws protecting human rights, enforcement was lax and convictions were rare….Officers at all levels acted with relative impunity and were rarely held accountable for illegal actions. When an officer was found guilty of a crime, the most common punishment was transfer to a different position or post.
During the year, police committed extrajudicial killings by the use of staged encounter killings, and deaths in custody were common. According to the Department of State, the officers who committed these killings and other human rights abuses “generally enjoyed de facto impunity.” The authorities often delayed prosecutions in custodial death cases, and according to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), state governments had not investigated at least 3,575 previous custodial death cases. The NHRC also reported that by the year’s end, no state had fully complied with its 1993 directive to report all deaths in police and judicial custody. The NHRC regards failure to report as tantamount to cover-up. When the courts awarded compensation to relatives in cases of custodial killings, the relatives often received no compensation, or had to pay bribes to receive it.
Custodial torture remained a severe problem, according to human rights groups cited by the report; the report states that evidence of torture was often found on the bodies of deceased detainees. Police often torture detainees for money or to force confessions, and usually following an illegal and arbitrary arrest. Custodial abuse in the form of rape also appeared to be more common than indicated by NHRC figures. Again, the government often failed to hold the guilty officers accountable for custodial abuse.
The report also states that prison conditions in India were “life-threatening” and that they did not meet international standards. Further, most detainees spent prolonged periods in prison while awaiting trial; thousands more remain in detention without charge.
Due to persistent inefficiencies in the judicial system, there were numerous instances in which detainees spent more time in jail under pretrial detention than they would have if found guilty and sentenced to the longest possible term.
The NHRC reported in 2004 that 75 percent of the country’s inmates were in pretrial detention.
The Department of State report also cited cases of custodial abuse involving the Punjab police. The Department of State reports that in 2004, the Punjab Police received 17,000 complaints, including 6,261 from the Punjab State Human Rights Commission.
The report noted developments in the case of Jaswant Singh Khalra, the human rights activist who was abducted, tortured in illegal detention, and murdered by Punjab police after he exposed the disappearances and killings of thousands of Sikhs in Punjab. In March, prosecution lawyer Brinjinder Singh Sodhi said that a police officer threatened him; however, no action was taken against the police official. On November 18, ten years after Khalra’s killing, police officers Jaspal Singh and Amarjit Singh were found guilty of murdering Khalra and destroying evidence related to the case (among other crimes), and were sentenced to life imprisonment. The court found four other officers guilty of kidnapping with the intent to murder and sentenced them to seven years imprisonment. (Visit ENSAAF to read the order or a summary of the order.)
The report also states that the government has failed to take action against the hundreds of police and security officials who committed grave human rights abuses during the 1984-1994 counterinsurgency in Punjab. The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) claimed to be pursuing charges against dozens of police officers implicated in these faked encounter killings and secret cremations.
NGOs and Human Rights activists alleged that police in Amritsar, Majitha, and Tarn Taran districts secretly disposed of approximately two thousand bodies of suspected Sikh insurgents they had murdered. Security forces abducted, extrajudicially executed, and cremated the alleged insurgents without the knowledge or consent of their families during the height of Sikh insurgency in Punjab.
Regarding the mass illegal cremations case in Punjab, the report stated:
The NHRC continued to investigate 2,097 cases of illegal murder/cremation that occurred between 1984 and the early 1990s….The NHRC has not released its findings, and no significant progress was made in bringing to justice those responsible for the killings. Families of victims petitioned the NHRC for redress, and a small percentage received a response in July 2004.
The Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP), a Punjab-based human rights organization, also did not receive an NHRC response to its report documenting 672 disappearance cases. These cases are part of the Punjab mass cremations case proceeding before the NHRC.
The Nanavati commission investigating the 1984 anti-Sikh pogroms released its report in August 2005. The government has also set up two committees to provide compensation. Although the commission report indicted several prominent Congress party leaders for complicity in the massacres, no formal punishment has resulted. Similarly, according to the report, only one policeman was convicted for committing atrocities during the pogroms even though the commission report highlighted the deliberate lack of action on the part of law enforcement to prevent the killings. ENSAAF’s blog (1, 2, 3) highlights deficiencies of the Nanavati Commission report and the government’s Action Taken Report, not discussed in the State Department’s country report.
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