Category Archives: Human Rights

Where Witches Don’t Make Magic

By Sahana Manjesh | Published: July 28, 2010
Anthropologists generally warn us against ethnocentrism. Witchcraft then is alien to you and I but as normal as normal can be to certain peoples. The celebrated Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande by E. E. Evans-Pritchard was a seminal work in understanding sorcery many years ago. His finding was that witchcraft is used as [...]
Also posted in Politics, Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Khap Panchayats: A lesson in legal pluralism?

By Arun | Published: July 23, 2010
(Guest post by Sahana Manjesh, a third year student at National Law School of India University, Bangalore.) One of the important debates within the sociology of law is the appreciation of legal pluralism. As a student of law, I am taught about the legal system in place in my country and elsewhere; a system that is [...]
Also posted in Civil liberties, Court | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

“Veiled Threat”

By Arun | Published: July 15, 2010
Nussbaum’s piece for the NYTimes on why the burqa ban does not suit the liberal democracies of Europe. Great read – she rips apart legal and moralistic arguments for such a ban, piece by piece. I’ve pasted disjunctive extracts here. The criticism is based primarily on inviolable philosophical underpinnings, and how the said reasons fail [...]
Also posted in Civil liberties, Constitution, Court, Democracy, International law, religion | Leave a comment

Political Q, Legal A

By Arun | Published: June 26, 2010
The text of an article I wrote for the Indian Express of June 25. You can access it in its original here. The group of ministers’ recommendation to submit a curative petition in the Union Carbide case is an attempt to force a political question down the throat of the Supreme Court, expecting it to [...]
Also posted in Court | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Incorporating “Aggression” into the Rome Statute: challenges and consequences

By Arani | Published: June 7, 2010
Over at the Kampala Review Conference delegates from aroud the world are in the process of incorporating the international crime of “aggression” into the roster of indictable offences already under the Rome Statute (genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity). The implications of such an insertion are significant, and in this post I am going to [...]
Also posted in International law | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The Supreme Court: India’s Dark Knight

By Arun | Published: June 5, 2010
So much for the notion that all of constitutional law lies there in the Constitution waiting for a judge to read it fairly […] That is why the simplistic view of the Constitution devalues our aspirations, and attacks that our confidence, and diminishes us. A week back, Justice David H. Souter, who stepped down from [...]
Also posted in Civil liberties, Constitution, Court, Democracy, Featured, Law, Rights, Rule of Law, india | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

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