The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act has in its four years faced many challenges in implementation, says a monitoring report. FIVE years ago, Parliament enacted a significant piece of legislation relating to women. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA), 2005, designed as a civil law, came into effect a year later, in October 2006. The fundamental feature of the Act was that it empowered magistrates...

A Supreme Court judgment projects the historical thesis that India is largely a country of old immigrants and that pre-Dravidian aborigines, ancestors of the present Adivasis, rather than Dravidians, were the original inhabitants of India. If North America is predominantly made up of new immigrants, India is largely a country of old immigrants, which explains its tremendous diversity. It follows that tolerance and equal respect for all communities and sects are...

Rights activist Binayak Sen has challenged in Chhattisgarh High Court the life sentence given to him by a local court after being convicted for sedition and links with Maoists, saying his involvement in the alleged crime was not proved beyond reasonable doubt. 58-yer-old Sen''s counsel Mahendra Dubey filed an appeal against his conviction yesterday, contending that after a thorough examination of the lower court''s judgement it has become clear his involvement...

Condemning the conviction of physician and human rights activist Binayak Sen as a travesty of justice, more than 250 physicians, medical professionals and students here on Tuesday demanded his immediate and unconditional release. Dr. Sen along with Maoist ideologue Narayan Sanyal and city-based businessman Pijush Guha was sentenced to life imprisonment on December 24 by a Raipur court on charges of criminal conspiracy to commit sedition under Section 124(a) of IPC. Assembling...

The Supreme Court on Tuesday stayed the proceedings in a criminal case registered against political analyst Ashish Nandy for an article published in a national newspaper on the 2002 Gujarat communal riots. A Bench of Justices Altamas Kabir and Cyric Joseph stayed the proceedings on an appeal filed by Mr. Nandy against a Delhi High Court order dated September 1, 2010, declining to quash the case registered against him under Sections...