Is the NHRC fulfilling its mandate?
For one thing, while it runs under the NHRC Act 2009, the Commission has not been able to finalise the set of rules that would determine how the body will mediate or investigate complaints of human rights violations. Without a well-defined legal procedure, the Commission does not know specifically how to record, investigate a complaint or what recommendations to give to the concerned authorities. While the act empowers the Commission to ask for reports from government agencies against which complaints have been made, it does not specify the timeframe within which the agencies are required to provide those documents. Thus a set of rules is needed to complement the Act in order to ensure justice for victims. The question is: why, even after 10 years, have these rules not been finalised? Our report says that the law ministry vetted the drafts of the rules in 2016 and has advised the Commission to finalise them if they serve its purpose.
One wonders why the Commission, which is supposed to work on behalf of the victims of human rights violations, has chosen to remain uninvolved. Many victims who could have received some form of justice are/have been deprived of that because the Commission has not taken up their cases in the way that it should have. It is high time that the NHRC finalised the rules so that it can perform its mandated task properly.
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