Aug
27
Draft Model Law on Communal Violence
August 27, 2004 | 1 Comment
In late July, the Union Home Ministry announced that it had begun to draft a new law aimed at combating communal violence:
This follows the CMP commitment for enactment of a ‘‘comprehensive law’’ against communal violence which will provide for investigations by a Central agency, prosecution by special courts and payment of uniform compensation to victims.
A group of jurists, human rights activists, and retired police officials recently submitted a draft model law — the Prevention of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity Act 2004:
One of the pathbreaking aspects of the draft is that it tries to enshrine for the first time in domestic law the principles of vicarious criminal and administrative liability as well as the doctrine of command responsibility — both settled concepts in international humanitarian law.
If India had enacted such legislation — as it was supposed to do soon after it became party to the Genocide Convention in 1959 — it is possible that the Gujarat Chief Minister would have thought twice about allowing the “Newton’s Law” to operate freely in his State following the Godhra incident…
The draft’s definition of genocide is the same as that of the 1948 Genocide Convention, with for one difference: it adds the attempt to subject a group to “sustained economic or social boycott” to existing elements of the crime such as killing members of a group or causing them bodily or mental harm.
Problems will still remain with implementation of the law. For example, as discussed in ENSAAF’s report Twenty Years of Impunity: The November 1984 Pogroms of Sikhs in India, prosecutions against perpetrators of the Sikh pogroms have failed because of government collusion with the police and protection of perpetrators, police failure to properly investigate and record abuses, destruction of evidence, harassment of potential witnesses, and manipulation and falsification of police records, among other things.
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