Warning shots fired into the air by police to control mobs were responsible for two deaths being probed by United Nations human rights experts, according to the Government of Nepal.
Both Rafikul Alam of Jhapa and Suraj Kumar Pandey of Kapilvastu were “unfortunate” victims of police attempts to control mobs, wrote the Permanent Mission of Nepal to the UN in Geneva in a response to the experts, also known as special rapporteurs, on 10 February.
Continue reading“It brings the urgency to seek justice even closer when family members are reminded of that small detail that they had forgotten over the years.”
— Pooja pant, memory, truth and justice project
To its credit, the Nepali media has written regularly about successive governments’ lack of action on transitional justice since the Comprehensive Peace Accord was signed in 2006. Reporting has focused on the legal framework, which in 2015 Nepal’s Supreme Court ruled must be revised because it granted amnesty for the most serious crimes of the conflict.
In the civil war, from 1996 to 2006, the state and Maoists combined to kill 17,000 Nepalis, torturing and disappearing thousands more.
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The Nepal Government has denied that a joint team from the Nepal Army and Chitwan National Park destroyed homes belonging to landless Chepang people on 18 July 2020.
The operation “removed 8 Katha of maize crop, 9 wooden towers and 2 sheds from the area (but) the operation team has not destroyed any of those 8 HHs [households] Iiving there and any of their property,” says a letter to United Nations (UN) human rights experts dated 21 December.
Razing of the houses was condemned by organizations led by Amnesty International Nepal, which called it an “act of cruelty” and a human rights violation.
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Anyone who lives in Nepal knows about caste and untouchability — the social rules that slot people into rigid groups from which they can rarely escape. At the bottom of the caste hierarchy are the Dalits, previously known as untouchables.
Anyone living in Nepal would also be aware of the deadly, violent crimes committed against Dalits, almost always with no legal consequences. But as you will hear in the introduction to this episode of Nepal Now, the incident reports from the Nepal Monitor provide a sense of the daily indignities and violence that Dalit people face in this country.
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Here’s a comprehensive article by Nepali Times. Nepal has been a member of the UN Human Rights Council since 2018 and is now running for a second term; the vote will likely take place at the General Assembly in October. However, many people in the human rights community argue that Nepal shouldn’t be re-elected because of its poor record, both in respecting human rights in Nepal itself and in its work as a council member. This is one issue to follow:
Nepal is running for re-election at the UN Human Rights Council, but has not done enough to protect rights
On 20 June 2019 Kumar Poudel was found dead, reportedly shot in the head, in Lalbandi-1, Chandranagar Forest in Sarlahi district, in what Nepal Police said was a shootout. He was in charge of the Netra Bikram Chand (‘Biplab’)-led Communist Party of Nepal in Sarlahi, and a probe by the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) called it an extrajudicial killing, recommending criminal charges against three police officers.
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Suman Adhikari poses with a photo of his father Muktinath, one of the 17,000 victims of Nepal’s conflict, 1996-2006. © Marty Logan
This week the Supreme Court of Nepal rejected the government’s attempt to strike down the court’s own 2015 decision directing the government to follow international standards in delivering transitional justice.
The big question now is: will the Government of Nepal finally live up to its many pledges to provide justice to survivors and families of victims of the conflict 14 years after the government-Maoist civil war ended?
In 2015 the Supreme Court directed the government to amend its Transitional Justice Act to meet global standards. Specifically, it was told to remove amnesty for those accused of the most serious crimes committed during the civil war, which killed roughly 17,000 Nepalis from 1996 to 2006. Those crimes include torture, rape and other sexual violence and ill-treatment and enforced disappearance.
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Nepalis wait after being blocked at the border in Darchula district, in the far west, on 31 March © Nepali Times
My latest article for Nepali Times, published today, 31 March, focused on the Government of Nepal’s policy of not letting citizens into the country since a lockdown began one week ago. Hundreds of people, most of them day labourers who were left without work after a similar lockdown in neighbouring India, are being blocked from entry at the India-Nepal border.
Nepali workers in India headed home on foot and by bus only to find their own country was not allowing them in.
With thousands of Nepalis stuck on the Indian side of the border, legal and human rights experts say the government of Nepal cannot legally deny entry to its citizens during the COVID-19 pandemic. Continue reading
Hello. There is so much information available on Covid-19 that I’m reluctant to add more, but a lot of it is good (or really bad) so I’m going to start sharing pieces that are already online. I’ll do this for a couple of days and if I see that people are interested I’ll continue.
Most worker households are likely to have enough supplies and savings for a week but if the lockdown is to continue, they will need government’s help, activists say — Kathmandu Post
Hospital staff in Nepal at the frontlines of the battle against COVID-19 lack protective gear —Nepali Times
A discussion with community health workers at Bayalpata Hospital about chhaupadi. ©Nyaya Health Nepal
Chhaupadi is the traditional practice in parts of rural western Nepal of segregating women and girls outdoors when they have their periods. In the past decade, more than a dozen women have been killed while staying in a chhau (shed), some from a snakebite, others after lighting a fire to say warm then suffocating in a windowless building. Women and girls in sheds are also at risk of sexual assault.
In recent years there has been increasing focus on chhaupadi, including various attempts to end it, such as demolishing sheds, criminalising the practice and threatening to withhold social security payments from anyone involved in the practice. I wrote the article below for Nepali Times after learning that one hospital in the region has had great success in getting its community nurses to discontinue chhaupadi.
It is easy to be cynical about recent reports of actions taken to end chhaupadi, the traditional practice in parts of western Nepal of segregating menstruating women.
A tree blocks a road near Butwal, Nepal during the Maoist conflict in 2005. Photo: Marty Logan
United Nations experts have critiqued draft changes to the Nepal law on the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), says an editorial in this week’s Nepali Times.
In April, the experts from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, known as ‘special procedures’, took the Nepal Government to task for its slow, faulty progress in transitional justice. This time, their letter focuses on three proposals for the NHRC Act:
