Deterrence Revisited
For more than two decades, India’s nuclear doctrine has been treated as a settled matter.
Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists, an international humans right body, released a 60-page report here titled, “Unnatural offences: Obstacles to Justice in India Based on sexual orientation and Gender identity."
The report documents the challenges queer persons in India face while trying to access justice, starting from the impact of laws that criminalise people for their real or imputed sexual orientation and gender identity; to police harassment, violence and abuse; and to discrimination and other hurdles within the justice system.
Advertisement
The report release was followed by a panel discussion which included prominent lawyer, Anand Grover, associate professor of Centre for Health and Law at Jindal Global Law School Dipika Jain and an activist associated with Nazariya Rituparna Borah.
Advertisement
Among the 150 interviewed across nine cities in India, including people who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender, the report uses the term “queer” to refer to any individual who identifies with a non-normative sexuality and gender identity.
“Criminalisation, police violence, and the prejudiced attitudes of officials in the courts’system have a profoundly detrimental impact on the ability and willingness of queer persons to resort to legal avenues to obtain justice,” said Sam Zarifi, ICJ’s Asia Director at the launch of the report.
“The systemic discrimination and violence faced by queer persons in India, and the challenges they face accessing justice, are clearly contrary to India’s international human rights law obligations and the Indian Constitution,” he added.
The report details using anecdotes how laws like Section 377 of the IPC are used by the police to blackmail people based on their real or imputed sexual orientation. Also when there is a law that provides legal entitlements and protections, queer persons continue to face a range of difficulties in accessing them.
Anand Grover, while talking about his experience with courts and laws in dealing with similar cases, said, “The challenges that lawyers who argue cases involving the human rights of queer persons combine with the biases of officials in the formal justice system compounding the difficulties queer persons face in obtaining justice."
Commenting on the nature of legal system, Mr Grover asserted, “our legal system is broken and we are operating at a number of levels, it delivers to people who are rich and there is often miscarriage of justice for people who come from underprivileged sections of the society.”
Rituparna Borah spoke mainly on the class question among queer people during the panel discussion. She also highlighted the ignorance on part of police and government officials in dealing with such cases.
“Whenever a case comes to us, we try to locate the class of the client, when we see that the client is rich, we get scared because generally they generally don’t tend to pursue the case. Most of the policemen do not even understand what transgender men are? They often end up asking, what is this?”
The report makes a number of recommendations to Indian authorities which include, ensuring that police officers promptly register any complaint regarding violence on queer people, provide legal and sensitisation training related to sexual orientation to lawyers and judges and repeal Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.
Advertisement
