This is an article by The South Asian Human Rights Documentation Centre (a network of individuals that seeks to investigate, document, and disseminate information about human rights) on the Indian government’s deliberate move to avoid investigations into human rights abuses in Kashmir. The blanket refusal by forces in Indian-Administered Jammu and Kashmir to investigate or release the identities of bodies buried in unmarked and mass graves is a gross violation of international law that India has been able to commit with impunity.
Topics: background, prohibition on enforced disappearances, the way forward, conclusions
Terms: failure of international accountability, failure of domestic accountability, legalized impunity, violation of international human rights law, extrajudicial killings, mass graves, failure of judicial system, failure to conduct judicial reviews, Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (SHRC), International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights (IPTHR), fake encounters, International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance
In 2009, the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights (ipthr) reported unmarked and mass graves containing approximately 2,943 bodies in 55 villages in Kashmir. ipthr fears that many of those bodies belong to the roughly 8,000 civilians believed to be victims of enforced disappearances by security forces in Kashmir. It suspects that some of these victims died during fake encounter killings.
The International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance, hereafter the Convention, which India signed in 2007, expressly prohibits enforced disappearance, including through the failure to disclose information about disappeared persons.
Indians need to shake off the fatigue and helplessness and empower themselves through concerted efforts to press the government to investigate. Similarly, the international community should take this opportunity to repair its credibility by refusing to engage in the selective enforcement of international law and demand that the Government of India meet its international obligations. To do otherwise is to allow India to disappear with impunity.
November 2012
Originally published
Photo creditDownload (PDF)Download Here