The National Campaign for People's Right to Information (NCPRI) on Tuesday questioned the “appropriateness” of the Lokpal and Lokayukta Bill, 2011, in respect of the proposed watchdog's independence, empowerment, jurisdiction and accountability. “The appropriateness of the Bill could well be determined by asking questions such as whether … [the proposed Lokpal] is adequately independent of the government, whether it is adequately empowered to detect, investigate and prosecute cases of corruption, had...

-The Hindu   Rajya Sabha MP and Congress spokesperson Abhishek Singhvi chaired the 30-member parliamentary panel that presented its voluminous report earlier this month on the Lokpal Bill 2011. The report has points of divergence with both the official Lokpal Bill draft and the Team Anna version. (The Union Cabinet on Tuesday night approved a Bill for the creation of the Lokpal with constitutional status that will have no control over the...

Six months before India's human rights gets reviewed at the United Nations, the Working Group on Human Rights (WGHR) in India released a report painting a dismal picture of its rights record. The U.N. Human Rights Council examines the rights record of its members on a rotational basis every four years through a peer review process, the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). Reports by the civil society, U.N. agencies and the country...

A report of the National People's Tribunal on the 2008 riots in Kandhamal, Orissa, is out. The report that runs into 197 pages points out that the brutality of the violence falls within the definition of 'torture' under international law, particularly the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.   According to the tribunal, headed by Justice A P Shah, communal forces used religious conversions as an issue for political mobilisation...

Bhukan Singh is a small, shy figure, with a nervous smile - he does not look like a hero. But standing in a field near his home, he recalls the day last March when his fight for transparency and justice in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand nearly resulted in his death. "In today's India speaking the truth is not easy," Mr Singh, 44, says wistfully, remembering how, on that March day...