Mar
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NHRC case update: Compensation announced
March 28, 2006 | Comments Off on NHRC case update: Compensation announced
The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has ordered the Punjab government to pay Rs 2.5 lakh in compensation to each of 38 people whose relatives died in custody and were illegally creamted by the police. This NHRC order increases the toal number of people awarded compensation to 148; at least 2,097 people in Amritsar district alone were killed and illegally cremated by the police.
As with the November 2004 award, the NHRC announced this award with no admission of liability or inquiry into the facts, even though these cases have established police custody resulting in illegal cremations. By preventing a complete determination of wrongdoing and liability, and by failing to provide compensation based on a full understanding of the different abuses suffered by survivors, this order undermines the rule of law and protection of human rights by eliminating an inquiry into the range of abuses and the systems that allowed such abuses to occur.
A recent article in Outlook India highlights police impunity for grave human rights abuses. Former Director-General of Punjab Police KPS Gill has argued that the threat of terrorism justified extreme police measures; the article, however, points out that police policies that rewarded killings resulted in corruption and abuse.
In just Amritsar district of Punjab, 2097 civilians were killed by the Punjab police and secretly cremated. This was done ostensibly to wipe out terrorism. But many of those cremated and listed as disappeared were found after investigation to have had no links to terrorism. So was it done for personal vendetta, or for extorting money, as claimed by many relatives of the victims?
Even after these cases of illegal cremation were documented and the Supreme Court ordered the NHRC to adjudicate the mass crimes, impunity for the police continues.
The NHRC limited its investigation of illegal cremations to only Amritsar district, ignoring the 16 remaining districts in the state. NHRC received 3,500 claims of illegal cremation in Amritsar.
Action taken by NHRC was pitifully inadequate. Instead of investigating these secret cremations as murders the Commission focused on the narrow issue of whether the victims’ bodies were cremated according to police rules! In almost nine years NHRC did not hear testimony in a single case, nor held a single security official or agency responsible for human rights violations.
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