Ramanisblog

Tag: Human Rights

  • Verma Committee Full Report Rape, Crime Against Women

    Following is the Report submitted by The Verma Committee .

    Verma Committee Report on Crime against women.
    Verma Committee Report on Crime against women.

     

     

    The Committee was formed  to look into crimes against women on Wednesday ruled against recommending the death penalty even in the rarest of the rare rape cases, and did not favour lowering the age of a juvenile from 18 to 16.

     

    Essential pints.

    No to Death Penalty.

     

    Don’t allow army men to take cover under AFSPA.

     

    “There is an imminent need to review the continuance of the AFSPA and AFSPA-like legal protocols in internal conflict areas as soon as possible,” it said. “This is necessary for determining the propriety of resorting to this legislation in the area(s) concerned.”

     

    “According to the Working Group on Human Rights, the murder rate has declined consistently in India over the last 20 years despite the slowdown in the execution of death sentences since 1980. Hence we do take note of the argument that introduction of death penalty for rape may not have a deterrent effect,” the Committee recommended.

    The Committee also said that in the proposed Criminal Law Amendment Bill, 2012, the minimum sentence for punishment for rape should be enhanced to a minimum of 10 years (currently it is 7 years) with maximum punishment being life imprisonment.

    The Committee said castration would be unconstitutional and inconsistent with basic human rights treaties to expose any citizen without their consent to potentially dangerous medical side effects.

    On the issue of reducing the age of a juvenile from 18 to 16, Mr. Verma said: “Assuming that a person at the age of 16 is sent to life imprisonment, he would be released sometimes in the mid-30s. There is little assurance that the convict would emerge a reformed person.”

    The Committee has criticised lack of reformatory and rehabilitation policies in jails and juvenile homes.
    “Personnel guilty of sexual offences in conflict areas should be tried under ordinary criminal law”

     

    Text of the Verma Committe(former chief justice of India Jagdish Sharan Verma)

    ”

    21. It is an admitted fact that women in India have
    suffered in various aspects of life and physical
    health, mental well-being, bodily integrity and
    safety, social relations, political empowerment,
    education and knowledge, domestic work and
    non-market care, paid work and other projects,
    shelter and environment, mobility, leisure
    activities, time autonomy, respect, religion, and if
    we may add, self-esteem / self-autonomy. We are
    of the opinion that Indian women have
    substantially suffered on most of these counts as a
    consequence of which the de facto equality
    guaranteed by the Constitution has not become a
    reality for them.

    . It is shocking to note that even after the recent
    horrific incident of gang rape, many political
    leaders, including members of Parliament/State
    legislatures, spiritual gurus with large followings
    and other eminent persons have been making
    statements reinforcing the gender bias. Some have
    even blamed the victim for having facilitated the
    rape by her own behaviour. Some of the worst
    examples are:
    (i) Shri Anisur Rahman (Communist Party of
    India (Marxist) – West Bengal): “We have
    told the chief minister in the assembly that the
    government will pay money to compensate rape
    victims. What is your fee? If you are raped, what
    will be your fee?”
    (ii) Shri Asaram Bapu: “Only 5-6 people are not
    the culprits. The victim is as guilty as her
    rapists… She should have called the culprits
    brothers and begged before them to stop… This
    could have saved her dignity and life. Can one
    hand clap? I don’t think so,”

    http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/realtime/justice_js_verma_committee_report.pdf

     

     

  • Discriminate Pregnant Women,Gays Australian Law

    Is this Enlightenment or stupidity?

    How about Pedophiles?

    The funniest part is that Corporations with over 300 Million $ are authorized to do so.

    Law of Discrimination,Australia
    The draft bill makes clearer which groups religious organisations can discriminate against lawfully.

    Story:

    Religious organisations, including those funded by the state government, retain their legal right to discriminate against pregnant women under a new human rights bill.

    The draft of the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill consolidates five existing federal discrimination laws after a decades-long campaign by lawyers and human rights advocates. The draft bill makes clearer which groups religious organisations can discriminate against lawfully.

    Under the draft bill, faith-based groups, including schools and hospitals, can still refuse to hire people because of a wide range of attributes that would be unlawful for any other organisation, including women who are pregnant or potentially pregnant.

    When the Sex Discrimination Act – which came into force in 1984 – was drafted, a number of religious bodies argued they should be allowed to discriminate against pregnant or ”potentially pregnant” women to avoid having to employ unwed mothers.

    The Human Rights Law Centre’s director of advocacy and strategic litigation, Anna Brown, said that while the bill introduced important new protections from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, and removed the ability of religious bodies to discriminate on the basis of age, sex and breastfeeding, it was a ”missed opportunity” to narrow the broad exemptions available to religious groups.

    Weet-Bix manufacturer Sanitarium is a religious organisation owned and operated by the Seventh-Day Adventist church, which means it could discriminate against people with these attributes.

    An online advertisement for a manufacturing team leader position with the company says: ”If you share our passion for what we do, our products and you can align with our Christian-based principles this is a great opportunity for you.”

    Sanitarium spokeswoman Julie Praestiin said the company’s workplace culture was ”grounded on Christian-based values of care, courage, humility, integrity and passion which are generally shared by the Australian community”.

    She said Sanitarium complied with employment laws. ”We are an equal opportunity employer and have a diverse workforce which encompasses a variety of cultures and worldviews. Religious belief is not a condition of employment.”

    Hugh de Kretser, executive officer of the Federation of Community Legal Centres, said that Sanitarium, which is understood to have a turnover of $300 million a year – although the church is not required to lodge Sanitarium’s financial reports – should not be allowed to discriminate.

    ”That a large organisation with a turnover of $300 million a year is given a green light by the law to discriminate highlights the problems with these exemptions,” he said.

    http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/political-news/religious-groups-free-to-discriminate-against-pregnant-women-20130116-2ctsz.html#ixzz2ICZ9Sosj

    http://www.reddit.com/tb/16ovis

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  • Human Rights,Look At Allies War Crimes Photo Essay

    Those who speak highly and vociferously of Human Rights Violations were/are the worst violators.

    Not a whimper.

    No Nuremberg.

    Pontificating B…….!

    Refer Wiki for individual crimes.

    http://listverse.com/2012/12/14/top-10-allied-war-crimes-of-world-war-ii/

    War Crimes of Allies.
    Throughout the war, almost all Allied nations carried out air raids on non-military, civilian targets. A tactic used by both sides primarily to destroy morale – most notably as part of Nazi Blitzkrieg – most air raids on civilian populations were little more then revenge attacks. During the last years of the war it started to posses a tactical purpose, when the Germans began to fortify and hold up within cities as they fell back. This does not forgive the indiscriminate murder of civilians earlier in the war, however.
    War Crimes Of Allies.
    Having received intelligence that a fleet of German U-Boats armed with V-1 Flying Bombs were heading towards Eastern coast of America, the U.S. and Canada sent out a large anti-submarine task force comprised of some 42 destroyers and four aircraft carriers to neutralise the threat. Over the course of a month, the fleet sank five German submarines and captured two others, while suffering the loss of one destroyer. But this entry concerns the treatment of five crew-members from the U-546, who were brutally interrogated in order to quickly extract information concerning a possible missile attack on the eastern coast. One officer who was tortured committed suicide whilst in custody. Were the American torture methods justified? You decide – but bear in mind that the fears later turned out to be unfounded.
    War Crimes of Allies.
    Housing the London Cage, Kensington Palace Gardens in London witnessed its fair share of war crimes during the Second World War. The Cage was essentially a set of cells and rooms used to hold and interrogate captured members of the Schutzstaffel and Gestapo. Everything from starvation and sleep deprivation to brutal beatings was practiced within its walls. to extract information and, in some cases, confessions. Though undeniably a war crime, no participants were ever prosecuted. The British government, for the most part, turned a blind eye to the abuse – despite multiple complaints from various parties – arguing that it was justifiable given the situation.

     

    War Crimes of Allies.
    Kocevski Rog Massacre Murder of POWs and Non-Combatants Committed during May of 1945, the Kocevski Rog Massacre describes the systematic murder of members of the repatriated Slovene Home Guard and their families by Allied Yugoslaw Partisans. During this period, up to 12,000 people were thrown into pits, caves and crevices which were subsequently sealed using explosives. No one ever faced prosecution for this atrocity.
    War Crimes of Allies.
    Dachau Massacre Murder of POWs As American soldiers approached Dachau concentration camp, they bore witness to thousands of highly decomposed bodies sitting in open top freight carriages. Because of this, it can hardly come as a surprise when American soldiers summarily executed captured – and unarmed – SS guards, purely out of rage. Prisoners, too, were said to have beaten as many as 50 guards to death in retaliation for their treatment. Unfortunately, the guards who operated the camp and carried out most of the atrocities for the majority of the war had fled many days beforehand, and were replaced with members of the Waffen-SS, whose sole purpose was to surrender the camp to the Allied force without resistance. Thus, the men were unjustly executed for crimes they did not commit. No one was ever court-martialed for the massacre.

     

    War Crimes of Allies.
    Rheinwiesenlager Death-by-Neglect of POWs. The Prisoners of War Temporary Enclosures, or Rheinwiesenlager, were a collection of 19 U.S.-built prisoner of war camps constructed to hold German POWs during the Allied occupation of Germany. At the program’s height, the camps held up to two million prisoners, although the precise number of individuals imprisoned is unknown due to poor record keeping. Due to the sheer size of these camps, the Allies struggled to provide enough supplies for all the prisoners, which resulted in thousands of deaths. Typical estimates put the number of deaths from starvation, exposure and dehydration at up to 10,000. This figure has been heavily debated, however, with some researchers placing the death toll in the hundreds of thousands. Regardless, these deaths would have been classed as a war crime under the 1929 Geneva Convention if it wasn’t for the fact that Eisenhower ordered the prisoners to be classed as Disarmed Enemy Forces, in order to circumvent the treaty.
    War Crimes of Allies.
    Operation Overlord Massacres Murder of POWs. Once the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy and began to capture large swathes of occupied land, they had a problem: what to do with the thousands of captured POWs? Instead of shipping them off to camps, many were simply executed where they stood to save time and resources which were much needed on the western front. For many of the dead, their only crime was being German. There is much worse, however. Although the veracity of the testaments is highly debated amongst historians, there were reports of the Allies using captured German soldiers as human shields – forcing them to walk through minefields to clear the way for advancing allied forces, and marching them headfirst into German encampments to avoid defensive gunfire. The exact number of soldiers executed or killed after surrender is unknown, as the fatalities for the most part resemble normal war-time deaths.

     

    War Crimes of Allies.
    Nuclear Weapons Murder of Non-Combatants Though born out of desperation and perhaps necessity, the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is, arguably, a war crime. It is claimed that such drastic measures prevented the need for a land invasion of Japan, and the potential deaths of millions of individuals. But this ignores the fact that the majority of deaths arising from an invasion would have been military combatants, rather then civilians. The Geneva Convention (and in particular the 1977 amendment: Protocol I) explicitly declares that the indiscriminate targeting of non-combatants, such as civilians, is a war crime. Given that the use of nuclear weapons on civilians populations today would be considered a war crime, as well as a crime against humanity, I can see no reason why one would not consider the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki a war crime.
    War Crimes of Allies.
    Prussian Rape Mass Rape. After the fall of Berlin, Germany was in ruins. Occupied by millions of foreign troops, none of whom had complete control over any given entity, Germany quickly descended into anarchic lawlessness. It is believed that the Soviet Army alone was responsible for the rape of up to two million women and children, as well as the subsequent death of 240,000. Claimed to be the largest mass rape in history, many unfortunate victims were assaulted up to a hundred times, and often could not resist in the face of overwhelming Soviet numbers. For the most part, these atrocities were driven by the lust for revenge, although in many cases it was simply because the Soviets saw themselves as conquers, not liberators. Stalin himself was reputed to have said that people should be understanding, “if a soldier who has crossed thousands of kilometres through blood and fire and death has fun with a woman or takes some trifle.” It wasn’t just the Soviets who were accused of this crime, however: it is believed that the US was responsible for over 11,000 rapes, while the French have been accused of over 1,500. This is clearly not on the same scale as the Soviets – but it doesn’t make it any less terrible.

     

    War Crimes of Allies.
    Chinese War Crimes Murder of POWs and Non-combatants, Torture, Looting, Rape, Mutilation. It’s widely accepted that the Second Sino-Japanese war was perhaps one of the most brutal conflicts ever to have occurred in human history. With a history of intense rivalry and conflict, little mercy was shown from either belligerent during this eight year long war. Although the Japanese were guilty of crimes that bordered on genocide, the Chinese, too, are reputed to have committed their fair share of war crimes. Unfortunately, due to the volatile and vicious nature of the war, there was practically zero press on the ground to provide concrete evidence of atrocities (the photograph above, taken by Tom Simmen, is one of the few to have surfaced). Survivors, however, reported mass looting and pillaging, summary execution, and torture of POWs and Chinese civilians believed to have been collaborating with Imperial Japan – as well as mass rape within occupied settlements – to name but a few.

     

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  • Unmarked Graves,Kashmir’s Torture Trail Videos

    Kashmir’s Torture Trail [couchtripper]

     

    Kashmir’s Torture Trail – Raped By Soldiers [couchtripper]

    The issue of Human Rights by The Fundamentalists is one thing.

     

    By The Government?

    Unmarked Graves in Kashmir
    Kashmir -Unmarked Graves

     

    Media Too!

     

    One feels extremely shameful even to talk of the genocide of the Tamils in Sri Lanka.

     

    Let’s set our house in order as well.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2012/jul/10/kashmir-torture-trail-video

    Story:

    Indian authorities should immediately open an independent, transparent, and credible investigation into the unmarked graves discovered in Jammu and Kashmir state, Human Rights Watch said today. An inquiry by the police investigation team of the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission (SHRC) has found 2,730 bodies dumped into unmarked graves in four of the state’s 14 districts. Thousands of Kashmiris have been forcibly disappeared during the last two decades of violence, their whereabouts unknown.

    http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/08/24/india-investigate-unmarked-graves-jammu-and-kashmir

    More than 2,000 corpses, believed to be victims of Kashmir‘s long-running insurgency, have been found buried in dozens of unmarked graves in the divided region, an Indian government human rights commission report has said.

    The graves were found in dozens of villages on the Indian side of the line of control, the de facto border that has split the former kingdom betweenIndia and Pakistan for nearly 40 years.

    “At 38 places visited in north Kashmir, there were 2,156 unidentified dead bodies buried in unmarked graves,” the inquiry found.

    Though campaigners and community leaders in Kashmir have long said such graves exist – and often provided extensive documentary evidence to back up their claims – the report is the first official statement confirming their existence.

    Released over the weekend, its publication is the result of a three-year inquiry by an 11-member team led by a senior police official.

    Up to 70,000 people died in the 22-year insurgency in Kashmir, which pitted armed separatist groups, many backed by Pakistan, against New Delhi‘s rule.

    The worst of the violence occurred during the mid-1990s when a vicious struggle pitted thousands of militants against Indian security forces supplemented by locally-hired irregulars. Human rights abuses were routine with militants intimidating local communities and killing so-called spies while Indian authorities resorted to abductions, torture and extra-judicial executions on a wide scale. The graves appear to date from this period.

    Kashmir is India’s only Muslim-majority state and the struggle rapidly took on a religious dimension. The victims in the mass graves had been buried by local communities.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/21/kashmir-unmarked-graves-thousands-bodies

  • Concept Of Freedom, US Style-Immigrant Beaten to Death

    “A new PBS documentary exposes the tasing and beating death of a Mexican immigrant by U.S. border agents in California and has renewed scrutiny of what critics call a culture of impunity. In May 2010, 32-year-old Anastasio Hernández-Rojas was caught trying to enter the United States from Mexico near San Diego. He had previously lived in the United States for 25 years and was the father of five U.S.-born children. But instead of deportation, Hernández-Rojas’s detention ended in his death. A number of border officers were seen beating him, before one tasered him at least five times. He died shortly afterward. The agents say they confronted Hernández-Rojas because he became hostile and resisted arrest. But previously undisclosed videos recorded by eyewitnesses on their cell phones show a different story. “All eyewitnesses that we spoke to basically tell the same story of a man hogtied and handcuffed behind his back, not resisting, being beaten repeatedly by batons, by kicks, by punches, by the use of a taser, for almost 30 minutes until he died,” says reporter John Carlos Frey, whose exposé aired in a national television special last Friday night as part of a joint investigation by the PBS broadcast, “Need to Know,” and the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute. We also speak with Hernández-Rojas’s widow, María Puga. “My husband was tortured. He was severely beaten. And they’ve destroyed an entire family,” says Puga, speaking through a Spanish–English translator. “All we want is justice. And we need your help to get that justice.” [includes rush transcript]”