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വായന

28 February, 2008

Asian Legal Resource Centre reports on human rights situation in India

The Asian Legal Resource Centre (ALRC), a unit of the Asian Human Rights Commission, has submitted a country report on India for consideration by the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) process.

The report concentrates on the issues of caste-based discrimination, policing and custodial torture, and the right to food, including starvations deaths.
The report can be seen at http://www.alrc.net/PDF/ALRC-UPR-1-002-2008-India.pdf

The UN Human Rights Council (HRC) established the UPR as a means to monitor the human rights situations in all UN member-States, starting with the members of the HRC itself, ostensibly to avoid the situation encountered in the past in which grave violators of human rights were able to achieve membership of the UN’s apex human rights body. Each member-nation will be reviewed every four years.

The state in question will submit a 10-page report concerning its evaluation of its performance with regard to human rights. The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) will prepare a 10-page report concerning its evaluation of the state’s record. NGOs and other stakeholders, including national human rights institutions, have been invited to submit five-page reports that will be synthesized by the OHCHR into a third 10-page document.

The ALRC has submitted reports in respect of six other Asian countries too. They are Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Korea and Sri Lanka. For details, kindly visit http://www.alrc.net/pr/mainfile.php/2008pr/133/

A working group of UPR is scheduled to consider the reports on India, Indonesia and the Philippines between April 7 and 18, 2008. The reports on Japan, Pakistan, South Korea and Sri Lanka will be reviewed between May 5 and 16, 2008.

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