Foreign Desk Report
NEW YORK: Three United Nations human rights experts have called on India to “immediately” stop its intimidation and a series of reprisals against Amnesty International (AI) in response to the organization’s work in exposing human rights violations in India, especially in occupied Kashmir and during the February anti-Muslim riots in Delhi.
London-based Amnesty International, a human rights organization, halted operations in India in September after its bank accounts were frozen and its executives interrogated by Indian financial authorities, in what AI called was a two-year campaign of harassment.
In a second joint letter sent to India from Geneva, the UN experts recounted the systematic harassment being inflicted by the Hindu nationalist government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, pointing out the “illegal freezing” of the bank accounts under the the Foreign Contribution Regulation (FCRA) law, which is incompatible with international human rights standards.
The respective retributive actions “are a strong indication that the Indian Government has tried to intimidate, muzzle and punish the Non-governmental Organization (NGO) for its reporting on and advocacy against human rights violations in the country”. The State-sanctioned smear campaign against Amnesty, evident from media leakage of a dossier on AI by Indian investigative agencies, was a deliberate attempt to tarnish the reputation, the experts said, and called for unfreeze the organization’s bank accounts.
The joint letter was sent by the experts, also known as UN Special Procedures or Rapporteurs, to India on 21 October 2020, and made public on Monday after India did not respond to it within the given deadline of 60 days. India has adopted a policy of ignoring UN rights experts’ letters in what diplomats called was a ” deliberate defiance of its human rights obligations.”
In October, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have already publicly voiced her serious dismay over the tightening of space for human rights organizations in India and appealed to New Delhi to safeguard the rights of human rights defenders, and their ability to carry out their crucial work.
