The Kashmir Law and Justice project has just released ” Complete Injustice: The Indian Supreme Court and the Misrule of Law in Kashmir.”
This “report is a good faith attempt to describe the nature of India’s relationship to Indian- administered Jammu and Kashmir (hereafter, IAJK) and the Indian government’s relationship to the people of IAJK..”
The project’s “analysis is intended to advance the understanding of what that experience has to tell us through grounding ourselves in factual history and the principles of international law. The conclusions and implications of our analysis are sobering and might be summarized as follows:
- Constitutionalism does not guaranty human rights or the rule of law.
- Systems of governance that are widely recognized as democratic can be (and are) as unrepresentative and more repressive than systems widely recognized as authoritarian or autocratic.
- Our era is not post-colonial; decolonization has not even started in some places.
- Bad faith is rampant, including (and perhaps especially) among the powerful. However, it is often not recognized, especially in the powerful.
- Nation-states (and the notions of people- as-nation, sovereignty and territorial integrity on which they are based) are often the problem. They are not fit to solve the problems they create or the crises they nourish.
- The international community and the United Nations have not been guarantors of international peace, security or peremptory norms. They are often ineffective (if we take their commitments seriously) and have aided and abetted the commission of grave violations of the peremptory norms (like human rights and the rule of law) on which their legitimacy and credibility depend. Even on issues that are central to the international order (like IAJK), those violations are blatant systematic, longstanding and not engaged with or addressed in good faith.”
Key Developments in the Human Rights Situation in Indian-Administered Kashmir November 1 – November 30, 2023
The Law and Justice Project provides important monthly updates on what is happening behind the veil of silence in Kashmir.
See October here.
See more reports
Kashmir Law & Justice Project is an advocacy organization led by Kashmiri diaspora lawyers that seeks to bring attention to, and to redress, historic and ongoing rights violations in Indian-Administered Jammu and Kashmir.
Photo credit: The Poisonous Tree of Colonialism, used with permission for the report “Complete Injustice.”