The United Nations has asked India to repeal the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, saying it had no role to play in a democracy. “The AFSPA in effect allows the state to override rights in the disturbed areas in a much [more] intrusive way than would be the case under a state of emergency, since the right to life is in effect suspended, and this is done without the safeguards applicable...

Twenty years after a case of staged shootout, a CBI court in Ghaziabad on Thursday held 17 policemen guilty and sentenced 16 of them to life imprisonment, making it perhaps the largest number of cops convicted for life at one go in the country. They were convicted of killing an alleged Sikh militant, Jaivender Singh Jasna of Amritsar, in a fake encounter in 1992. One of them was given a seven-year...

-The Hindu The Central Bureau of Investigation told the Supreme Court on Friday that the killings of Cherukuri Rajkumar alias Azad, spokesperson of the Communist Party of India (Maoist), and journalist Hemchandra Pandey by the Andhra Pradesh police on the night of July 1, 2010 were not a fake encounter as alleged in the petitions filed in the court. The CBI made the submission in its final investigation report filed before a...

Ten years after the killings in Gujarat, Narendra Modi has neither expressed regret nor has he been held accountable for those mass deaths. Where do we go from here? Anand Teltumbde (tanandraj@gmail.com) is a writer and civil rights activist with the Committee for the Protection of Democratic Rights, Mumbai.   Just thinking of it, a shiver runs down my spine. I had my own brush with how the Hindutva gangs carried out the...

-Economic and Political Weekly Strict implementation of NHRC guidelines for investigation into fake “encounters” is a must. The killing of five suspected bank robbers in Chennai on 23 February by police officers tasked with apprehending them looks suspiciously like yet another case of a fake “encounter”. News reports following the killing have brought out various inconsistencies in the claim of the police that they fired in self-defence.   After directives from the National Human...