Feb
13
Questionable Appointment to Punjab Human Rights Commission
February 13, 2004 | Comments Off on Questionable Appointment to Punjab Human Rights Commission
An article about a police seminar for the Punjab IPS officers association, at which a US professor spoke, mentioned the appointment of R.L. Anand, former Justice of the Punjab and Haryana High Court, to the Punjab State Human Rights Commission. This appointment has occurred despite Justice Anand’s record in disposing of habeas corpus petitions filed on behalf of the disappeared in Punjab. As stated in A Judicial Blackout: Judicial Impunity for Disappearances in Punjab, India:
Several High Court justices and lawyers described the judiciary’s attempts to ignore disappearances and “sweep the matter under the carpet.”[96] The High Court’s reliance on the police’s denial or its lack of motive as evidence of its innocence shows that the High Court did not intend to investigate these allegations. In Swinder Singh v. Punjab, Justice R. L. Anand dismissed the petition, asserting, “The directions sought by the petitioner cannot be printed in view of the categorical stand of the State that Mandeep Singh and Harvinder Singh were killed in a genuine encounter.”[97] Thus, the mere fact of the police denial led the judiciary to conclude that the petitioner’s allegations lacked merit and did not constitute a prima facie case of disappearance….
Although there is no statute of limitations for writ petitions, justices dismissed numerous petitions on the grounds of delay. At least nine of the cases I studied were dismissed for delay, six of which came from the bench of Justice R. L. Anand. He initially told me that cases are never dismissed for delay. When I questioned Justice Anand regarding his dismissals and whether fear of police reasonably explained the delay, he justified his dismissals. If people waited to file a case, that meant their grievances were not genuine: “If a man has kith or kin who have been detained illegally, he will rise to the High Court like anything… people are very vigilant of their rights.”[110] Supreme Court lawyer Ashok Agrwaal criticized the use of delay to dismiss petitions. Not only did early dismissal because of delay fail to acknowledge the reasons for delay, such as police harassment, people’s lack of knowledge of legal options, and people’s desire to use non-legal methods, but the dismissal also spoke to the general climate of impunity. Police merely had to harass possible petitioners for three years in order to defeat their petitions in court.
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