Human Rights FAIL and ‘Progressive Realization’

Some days India just makes me want to vomit.

My first approach to reading the news, whether Washington Post or Times of India, is usually to scan a number of headlines and then read them in order of interest throughout the day. There are so many heartbreaking stories, especially right now about rape, on the front page. Then there are stories about acid-throwing and child marriage. And coercive sterilization. And gangrape. And maternal mortality. And hazing so bad the college student still can’t walk four months later. 

At some point I want to cry, the same way I react when a story from the Post or the Boston Globe hits close to home. And the stories keep coming. A 13 year old raped and imprisoned for over a week, and her parents want her to marry the rapist. And another woman raped. And the man who killed his two children and was arrested on his way to kill his wife.

The sheer volume of it makes me sick.

India has so many wonderful human rights laws. People here have a right to life, health, and mental health, arguments that I employ in court petitions for reproductive rights. There is a right to equality, to be free from discrimination. But in reality, there are still so many terrible things here.

I drafted the above post on Friday afternoon at work, while I was reading news stories to compile my weekly report on reproductive rights in the news. Thankfully, my day took a sharp turn shortly after. My office has semi-regular Friday afternoon meetings and at 4:45pm, someone turned off the lights on our floor as a sign that we should come to the basement conference room for a meeting. I could never picture this happening in the U.S., but we trooped downstairs and took our seats.

The Founder and Director of HRLN, Colin Gonsalves, wanted to tell us about his experience visiting protesters at the Kudankulam reactor in Tamil Nadu in the south last week and also to spearhead a discussion on the prosecution of the accused gang rapists. I’ve met him twice, but this was the first time I really heard him speak, and he gesticulated dramatically as he held court over thirty or so employees for half an hour. He was passionate and articulate, and now I have a face that I can picture arguing the cases I am researching. We broke the discussion into two main pieces:

• Death Penalty

• Why does the death penalty keep coming back up despite HRLN’s and other efforts to discourage it? The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in 1980 in Bachan Singh ordered that the death penalty be used in only the "rarest of the rare" cases and that it could only be used when:
• (a) the act is heinous and
• (b) the person is unable to be rehabilitated
• It’s easy to think that the gangrape was so terribly vicious that the people involved cannot be reformed…but any 1L can tell you that saying the first thing is really really bad is not the same as fulfilling the second prong and many people, including the media, seem to have forgotten that.

• What is the appropriate punishment for the juvenile involved? According to the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection) Act, 2000, he can be sentenced to a maximum of three years imprisonment, but, juveniles may only be held until they turn eighteen, which would be approximately 6 months in his case.

It was a lively discussion, with several people talking at the same time, and I was surrounded by activists who truly want to make the world a better place. The title of this post, Progressive Realization, is a nod to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which was signed but not ratified by the U.S. Article II requires States to take steps

"to the maximum of its available resources,

with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights
recognized in the present Covenant by all appropriate means,
including particularly the adoption of legislative measures."

In some ways, Progressive Realization is a great aspirational goal, but it often feels like a pass that lets States get away with claiming they are trying, without making any real progress. India is Progressively Realizing equal rights for women…but I’m not sure what that actually means, and I know it isn’t happening fast enough.