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India put pressure

on AI to amend

HR abuses report

NEW DELHI: Indian government has pressurised Amnesty International to amend and reduce the volume of its report released earlier, which contained 125 pages on India only and criticised India for gross human rights violation committed by its security forces.

It is pertinent to point out that Amnesty International has expressed its grave concern, at the recently concluded Human Rights' Conference in Geneva, over the human rights violations in Held Kashmir and other parts of India.

Notably, it has been the biggest volume of any chapter ever published by the Amnesty International on any country of the world.

In the same report the two other countries, viz, Colombia and Algeria, have only 12 and 10 pages respectively. Indian government after having been criticised by the world, sent Justice Ranganath Mishra, Chairman of the Indian National Commission for Human Rights, to London last year to pressurise and influence Derek Evans of Amnesty International for making its report on India "a little proportionate".

'Amnesty' has more than a million members in 170 countries. There are 850 Amnesty International groups in 15 countries in Asia/Pacific region and 14 are in India.

One of the senior officials of the 'Amnesty' commented that to ensure the Amnesty's independence and impartiality, its members do not gather, assess or act upon information about human rights cases in their own country. He added that all the information used as the basis for Amnesty International documents is carefully verified through research network, and that it is ensured that the reports are independent and impartial.

The recent 'Amnesty' report, which was abridged after hectic Indian efforts, contains 23 pages on India, which are replete with incidents of human rights' violations by Indian security forces in East Punjab, Andhra Pradesh and Held Kashmir as also elsewhere in India.

The report says that violations such as torture, including rape, and deaths in custody remain endemic, and political prisoners continue to face unfair trials. The report talks of "a legal and judicial system that facilitates these and many other abuses, often allowing the perpetrators to act with impunity".

It says "the safeguards that do exist are regularly disregarded".-APP