India’s Human Rights Situation Is Very Serious, Says UN Special Rapporteur
The Indian American Muslim Council ( IAMC ), an advocacy organization dedicated to safeguarding India’s pluralist and tolerant ethos, has launched a report titled, “ Crushing Dissent: 2021 Status Report on Human Rights in India ,” detailing human rights abuses in India. At the launch of this report, UN Special Rapporteur Ms Mary Lawlor called upon the Indian government to immediately release 16 human rights defenders who have been imprisoned on charges of terrorism in the ‘Bhima-Koregaon Case’.
“These people should not be in jail. They are our modern-day heroes and we should all be looking to them and supporting them and demanding their release,” Mary Lawlor, UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights Defenders, said on Thursday.
Along with Father Stan Swamy, the octogenarian Jesuit priest against whose “arbitrary detention” in this case she has already written to the Indian Government, Ms Lawlor said 15 others jailed in the same case must also be released.
The so-called Bhima-Koregaon case refers to violence at a public meeting called three years ago by low-caste Hindus at a village known as Bhima-Koregaon in Maharashtra state. Several civil rights investigations have established that upper caste Hindus allied with India’s ruling party, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s BJP, carried out the violence. Police have, however, targeted human rights defenders, who deny their involvement.
Ms Lawlor, whose three-year term as UN Special Rapporteur began last May, also called out the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), under which the Bhima-Koregaon accused have been charged, as among the “several prominent pieces of legislation that would appear on paper and in practice to undermine rights contained in the covenant and the work of human rights defenders.”
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