Musings on India, the law, and policy
Posted in Democracy, Rule of Law, Terrorism, Uncategorized on Feb 18th, 2011
The “Anti Nationals” : Review of the Human Rights Watch report on arbitrary detention and torture of terrorism suspects in India Just a few days ago, British Prime Minister David Cameron made a startling speech at the Munich Conference stating that the passing acknowledgment of ‘state multiculturalism’ and policy of tolerance was one of the [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Feb 16th, 2011
Litigation is often argued to be an evil one cannot do without in the society. Moving from traditional forms of dispute resolution in society, we now have an extremely complex system of resolving disputes involving various laws and procedures. The result has been the recognition that a class of professionals, i.e lawyers are now indispensable [...]
Posted in Constitution, Court, india on Jul 8th, 2009
The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to buy the argument that ‘Hanging is inhuman’. The petitioner Ashok Kumar Walia had argued that hanging was a “cruel and painful” method of execution and should be replaced by lethal injection or any other method. The Chief Justice refused to take note of the argument stating that there was no [...]
With close to 70 lakh crores ( 70,000,00,00,00,000 ) of unaccounted public money stashed by politicians, bureaucrats and the rich in swiss banks and the like abroad, how does one get hold of that money ? The answer probably could be the latest writ petition in the Supreme Court wherein the petitioners have asked the [...]
Posted in Constitution, Court on Mar 24th, 2009
“In a rule of law society operating under a constitutional order, either deterrent or preemptive executive action against prohibited human conduct including terrorist acts must be pursued only within the matrix of legislatively spelt out substantive and procedural rules of engagement and sanction. The executive, whether political or the professional has no legitimate authority to [...]
Keeping my feelings against the Death penalty aside, the verdict in the Nithari killings comes as a shock to me. It is not that I thought either of them to be innocent, but the idea of giving the harshest punishment meted out by law to them is what I’d like to question. Perhaps the best [...]