Categories
Litigation

How a CRZ violation is leading to a small revolution in Karnataka

Baad, a village near my village of Kagal in coastal Karnataka, hosts a fair every year at the Shri Kanchika Parameshwari temple. As children, the joy of going to this fair was unparalleled. During the fair, the yakshagana, a folk dance, used to take place in a big field near the temple. Instead of paying to watch this dance, my friends and I used to play a game of dappanduppi with mud stones. These memories remain as fond connections to our childhood.

In 2008, while I was completing the final year of my BA studies, I came to hear that this field had been sold and that a big resort would come up there. Many questions about why the owners would want to sell such a prosperous field, where farmers would grow rice and peanuts during the monsoons and vegetables during the summer months, plagued me.

satellite image of Nayak Hospitalities
Satellite image of the Nayak Hospitalities compound

Nayak Hospitalities (“NH”) was the buyer and as a result of the purchase, farmers’ fields, some public wells, and even a cremation yard, was acquired. Public access to a beach was also blocked. The loss of the wells affected the supply of drinking water to three villages – Baad, Jeshtapura, and Gudeangadi. After NH built a wall of about 15 to 20 metres height around the occupied land, fresh breeze from sea stopped blowing into the village. The villagers, who were also worried about the dangers posed by the crumbling of the wall during the rainy season, complained to the panchayat on two occasions and asked for the height of the compound wall to be reduced, but the panchayat did not take any action.

As an Enviro-Legal Coordinator with the Centre for Policy Research (CPR)-Namati Environmental Justice Program, my job is to inform people about the law, and work with them to solve the various environment-related problems they face. I had helped conduct training programmes on awareness of the Coastal Regulation Zone Notification, 2011 (“CRZ Notification”) in Baad and surrounding areas. This led to discussions about the violations caused by NH and a decision to work together in collecting information, evidence, and pursuing remedies with the local authorities. Collection of information is central to the way we try to resolve problems. That way, if a similar problem arose in the district, a solution based on this case could be used.

Collection of information

The project had obtained clearance from the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change in December, 2010. Under this letter, permission had been granted to construct the resort on survey numbers 4 to 9, 11 to 13, 17, 19 to 21, 23, and 26 of Baad and survey numbers 14, 16, 18, and 19 of Gudeangadi. It also contained 12 specific conditions and 14 general ones but we observed that many of them had not been complied with.

Nayak Hospitalities compound area
Nayak Hospitalities compound area
  1. Construction on land in excess of permission given: The project had permission to construct on 5.26 ha, but ended up constructing on 9.67 ha. The land includes public property such as government wells, a cremation yard, a temple’s field, and also access to the beach.
  2. Construction in No Development Zone: Under the CRZ Notification, no new construction is allowed in the zone known as CRZ-III. However, the compound wall has been constructed in the 0-200m No Development Zone of CRZ-III.
  3. Access restricted: The lack of access to the three government wells located on NH’s property is leading to shortage of drinking water for the villagers living in the area.
  4. Non-permissible installation: The installation of a pumpset in the NDZ of CRZ-III is not a permissible activity. However, pumpsets have been installed on the NH site. This has reduced ground water in the region.

Advocating with authorities

I discussed strategy with the villagers and identified the relevant authorities. A letter was sent to the Regional Director (“RD”) of the Karnataka Coastal Zone Management Authority (KCZMA) office at Karwar. After a site inspection, the RD noted some violations and sent a report to the KCZMA and a notice to the proprietors of NH.

site inspection by regional director envrionment
Site inspection by Regional Director

Since no relief followed, the villagers and I decided to send letters to all relevant authorities including the District Commissioner (“DC”), Executive Officer (“EO”), and the Panchayat Development Officer (“PDO”). Site inspections were carried out and once again, notices were issued against NH. Upon request by the villagers, the panchayat on five separate occasions, gave notice to NH to reduce the height of the compound wall. This too had no effect. Finally, an order by the DC led to a reduction of the height of the wall from 15-20 meters to 6 feet. This was a small victory after two years of hard work.

Not a small victory

The victory was not absolute since the villagers still did not have access to the common land and the government wells. We used provisions in the Karnataka Land Reform Act, 1961, Panchayati Raj Act, 1993, and the Environmental Protection Act, 1986 and wrote letters to the DC, the EO, and the PDO. If any action had been taken pursuant to these letters perhaps a solution might have had been possible. The letters get transferred from one government department to another and my job then becomes to trace the status of the compliant. This is a waste of time, money, and energy.

The NH project is still inconvenient for the villagers in Baad and Gudeangadi and though their problems are not yet fully resolved, there is still hope. Through these two years, there has been immense support from the villagers of Baad and Gudeangad in working together to resolve the problems that they face. They now also have a pretty good understanding of the law and are in a position to seek remedies to their problems in the legal system. By working to get justice in this case, the villagers have also become more aware about the importance of the environment and common resources. This manner of legal empowerment has also helped them solve other small CRZ violations.

vinod photo

Vinod Patgar is an Enviro-Legal Co-ordinator with the Centre for Policy Research – Namati Environmental Justice Program.

Categories
Litigation Lounge

[Video] Mathura: The rape that changed India

Not many remember that 40 years before the horrific events of December 16, 2012, there was another incident, where a girl even younger than Jyoti Singh was raped.

Her name was Mathura and she was raped by police constables.

She survived and appealed to our courts but did not get justice.

Mathura’s journey through the criminal justice system however, gave rise to a women’s movement that spanned the whole of India and led in 1983, to groundbreaking change in the law on sexual violence against women.

It also inspired an extraordinary act of courage from four law professors who dared to raise their voices against the judiciary and pursue legal reform.

Join us to learn from Padma Shri Professor Upendra Baxi, Dean of the Delhi University Faculty of Law Professor Ved Kumari, and Senior Advocate Rebecca John, the story of Mathura’s rape, its transformation of our vocabulary on sexual violence, the changes it brought about in the law, and the inspiring personalities who made it happen.

Categories
Litigation

Supervening circumstances and the commutation of a death sentence: A more definitive law from the Supreme Court

ProceduralLawOfTheDeathPenalty_RahulRamanIf the situation that prevailed at the time a sentence of death was delivered has changed, can the Supreme Court take those changed circumstances into account to commute a sentence of death? Less than two years ago, the Supreme Court in Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India, 2014 (3) SCC 1, looked into whether executing a death sentence notwithstanding the existence of such supervening circumstances would violate among other things, Article 21 of the Constitution. After weighing such circumstances in different petitions, it commuted the penalty of fifteen individuals to life imprisonment and laid down a more definitive law on the Court’s power of commutation.

The petitioners had claimed that the executive, while exercising its power under Articles 72 or 161, did not consider any supervening events. In a few previous decisions such as Triveniben (1989) and Jagdish v. State of Madhya Pradesh (2009), the Court had declared that it had a duty to protect a prisoner’s right to life till his last breath. This provided the Supreme Court with the legal basis to take supervening circumstances into consideration and those pleaded in Shatrughan Chauhan included delay, insanity, solitary confinement, and procedural lapses.

Delay in processing mercy petitions

The question of whether the executive’s delay in processing a mercy petition should be considered a supervening circumstance has troubled the Court for a long time. There is no stipulated time limit within which the executive has to dispose a mercy petition and often, there is inordinate delay.

Earlier, a division bench of the Supreme Court in T.V. Vatheeswaran v. State of Tamil Nadu, AIR 1983 SC 361, had held that a delay of two years in execution of a sentence after the judgment of the trial court would entitle the prisoner to plead for commutation of his sentence of death to life imprisonment. Soon after however, a three-judge bench in Sher Singh and Others v. Union of India, AIR 1983 SC 465, held that delay alone could not be a good enough ground for commutation of death sentence, and overruled the two-year delay rule. Nevertheless, this decision acknowledged a prisoner’s right to a fair procedure at all stages – trial, sentencing, and incarceration.

To resolve this apparent conflict, a constitution bench took up this issue in Triveniben v. State of Gujrat, 1988 (4) SCC 574. In a landmark verdict, the Court held that while an undue delay would entitle a punished individual to invoke Article 32, Vatheeswaran’s “two-year delay rule” was not correct.

The Court relied on this decision in Shatrughan Chauhan. It held that while considering the rejection of a clemency petition, the Court could not overlook the pain caused to the convict. Therefore, the Court was well within its judicial power under Article 21 read with Article 32 of the Constitution to hear a convict’s grievance and commute a death sentence to life imprisonment if it is found that that there had been undue, unexplained, and inordinate delay in execution due to the pendency of a mercy petition.

The Court decided not to lay down any compulsory period within which the President has to decide a mercy petition. While the Court would make such a determination on the facts and circumstances of individual cases, it suggested that the executive should itself weigh the aspect of delay while disposing of a mercy petition.

The Court also said that the decision of the Court in Devender Pal Singh Bhullar v. State (NCT) of Delhi, 2013 (6) SCC 195, which had disqualified cases under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act, 1987 from scrutiny on account of delay, was per incuriam. Any person sentenced to death could avail “delay” as a supervening circumstance regardless of the offence and the statute under which he has been convicted. Later, the Supreme Court recognised this finding in Navneet Kaur v. State of NCT of Delhi, Curative Petition (Criminal) No. 88 of 2013 (Supreme Court) to commute Devender Pal Singh Bhullar’s death sentence to life imprisonment.

Insanity or mental illness

The next ground considered by the Court was that of “insanity” or “mental illness” as a supervening circumstance. The Court after referring to several international conventions like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights concluded that this was a valid supervening circumstance. It noted that once mental illness of the convicted individual is medically certified, executing him would be in violation of the international convention to which India was a party, and of Article 21 of the Constitution.

Solitary confinement

Despite underlining its own finding in Sunil Batra v. Delhi Administration and Others, 1978(4) SCC 494, the Supreme Court decided not to interfere on the ground of “solitary confinement” in Shatrughan Chauhan. Later however, the Allahabad High Court in People’s Union for Democratic Rights v. Union of India, 2015(2) ADJ 2015 and the Supreme Court in Ajay Kumar Pal v. Union of India, 2014(13) SCALE 762 held that “solitary confinement”, along with other factors, was a permissible supervening circumstance to commute death sentence to life imprisonment.

Procedural lapses

The final ground raised was that of “procedural lapses” made by the executive while disposing of mercy petitions. The Court held that the procedures prescribed for the Ministry of Home Affairs were a necessary requirement under Article 21 to treat the death row convicts fairly. It noted that the President should be provided with all the relevant material to assist him in disposing the mercy petitions. The concerned departments cannot give or seek piecemeal information regarding the petition to be decided. However, the scrutiny of a procedural anomaly would be done on a case-to-case basis.

The circumstances raised in Shatrughan Chauhan are not exhaustive. The addition (or removal) of supervening circumstances to this list would depend on the judicial attitudes to reconciling convict’s rights with those of the victim or the society. Further, despite the unambiguous decisions in Triveniben and Shatrughan Chauhan, it is entirely up to the Court to see on an individual basis, how to interpret ‘undue and unexplained’ delay and whether to permit it as a supervening circumstance.

(Rahul Raman is a Project Associate at the Centre on the Death Penalty, National Law University, Delhi.)

Categories
History Human Rights

The marital exception to rape: How to make a crime disappear

SayakDasguptaSir Matthew Hale, one of England’s greatest jurists, was a simple, humble, and fastidiously honest man. In fact, so unimpeachable was his character that, despite being a royalist who defended the opponents of the Commonwealth of England during the English Civil War, he was still appointed a justice of the common pleas by Oliver Cromwell when the Commonwealth came to power. When the Restoration happened, the King appointed him Chief Baron of the Exchequer, even though he had held office in the government of his mortal enemies. Hale, it is said, had no desire to receive the knighthood, so he literally had to be tricked into it (Lord Clarendon invited Hale to his house where the King was waiting to knight him on the spot).

For all his virtues, though, Hale was as much of a fusty old antiquarian when it came to women, as you would expect from a privileged, white, devoutly Puritan Englishman from the 1600s. In a letter to his granddaughters, he wrote longingly of a time when “the education and employment of young gentlewomen was religious, sober, and serious, their carriage modest and creditable was their habit and dress” and “when they came to be disposed of in marriage, they were themselves a portion whether they had little or much, and could provide for and govern a family with prudence and discretion, and were great helps to their husbands, and knew how to build up a family, and accordingly were instruments in it”. He bemoaned how times had changed and “young gentlewomen learn to be bold, talk loud and more than comes to their share, think it disparagement for them to know what belongs to good housewifery, or to practise it, make it their business to paint or patch their faces, to curl their locks, and to find out the newest and costliest of fashions.” He wrote that he would never allow his granddaughters to be like this, that he would train them to be “good wives and better portions to your husbands than the money you bring, if it were double to what I intend you, for you will be builders up of a house and family, not destroyers of it”. Above all, he wanted them to be “good examples to others, and be thereby a means to take off the reproach that justly enough lies upon the generality of English gentlewomen, that they are the ruin of families”.

Like most men of the time, Hale saw women as some sort of loveable hybrid between a trainable pet and an obedient servant, who should be strictly controlled lest they go out of hand. It is perhaps somewhat revealing that after his wife died, Hale married his housekeeper, Anne Bishop, whom he described in his will as “most dutiful, faithful and loving”, words that can also be used to describe an adoring butler or a loyal dog.

No longer enough to create further exceptions”

Four centuries of faith in wedding vows forming permanent consent for sex. Mathew Hale (left), when he was Chief Justice of the King's Bench and Union Minister for Women and Child Development, Maneka Gandhi. Maneka Gandhi's image is from the Press Information Bureau.

Four centuries of faith in wedding vows forming permanent consent for sex. Mathew Hale (left), when he was Chief Justice of the King’s Bench and Union Minister for Women and Child Development, Maneka Gandhi. Maneka Gandhi’s image is from the Press Information Bureau.

Perhaps Hale’s most famous work as a legal scholar is the Historia Placitorum Coronæ or The History of the Pleas of the Crown, which was published in 1736 (60 years after his death, despite an instruction in his will clearly stating that none of his manuscripts were to be published posthumously) and is considered a seminal work in the development and evolution of common law. It was in this book that he wrote the now (in)famous line that had been used until relatively recently in most common law countries to defend marital rape:

“But the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.”

The husband, then, by virtue of marriage, gained complete right over his wife’s body. Wedding vows were meant to be a form of permanent consent for sex. It would not be a stretch to say that for most women at the time, the bond of marriage was akin to bonded servitude mixed with sexual slavery.

This would be the norm in England for the next two centuries, but changes in social attitudes towards marriage began to make the marital exemption to rape seem increasingly more ridiculous with every passing year. In 1990, the Law Commission in England released the Working Paper No. 116 on Rape within Marriage in which it recommended unequivocally that the exemption should be abolished. But the final death knell for the spousal exemption came in 1991 with the House of Lords’ landmark decision in R. v R, in which the court held that “Hale’s proposition is based on a fiction and moreover a fiction which is inconsistent with the proper relationship between husband and wife today.” The judges observed that “courts have been paying lip service to the Hale proposition, whilst at the same time increasing the number of exceptions, the number of situations to which it does not apply. This is a legitimate use of the flexibility of the common law which can and should adapt itself to changing social attitudes,” but then added the powerful line: “There comes a time when the changes are so great that it is no longer enough to create further exceptions restricting the effect of the proposition, a time when the proposition itself requires examination to see whether its terms are in accord with what is generally regarded today as acceptable behaviour.”

On the question of whether the court should step aside to leave the matter to the Parliamentary process, the House of Lords stated: “This is not the creation of a new offence, it is the removal of a common law fiction which has become anachronistic and offensive and we consider that it is our duty having reached that conclusion to act upon it.”

RvR_HouseofLords_ChiefJusticeLordLane

With these words, England removed the marital exception to the crime of rape. In the United States, states had begun to remove this exception since the 1970s, and by 1993, all 50 states had done so. By the dawn of the 21st century, marital rape was a crime in most European nations. Our neighbour Bhutan had declared it a crime as far back as 1996, and Nepal followed suit 10 years later. Today, marital rape is a crime in the majority of the countries in the world. India, however, chooses to remain on the list of countries where it isn’t; a list that includes Afghanistan, China, Eritrea, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

In the wake of the horrific events of December 16, 2012, the Justice J.S. Verma Committee reflected long and hard on how our criminal law system deals with various kinds of sexual violence perpetrated on women and children. Nearly six pages of its Report concentrated on the problem of marital rape. It recommended that the exception for marital rape be removed (Exception 2 to Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 states that “Sexual intercourse or sexual acts by a man with his own wife, the wife not being under fifteen years of age, is not rape”), and that the law ought to specify that a marital relationship between the perpetrator and the victim cannot be used as a defence against rape and that it should not even be regarded as a mitigating factor justifying lower sentencing for rape.

MaritalExceptionToRapeIPC

The ordinance that was drafted on the basis of the Report included many of its recommendations but left out some of the most important ones, perhaps chief among them the recommendation on marital rape. Defending the ordinance, Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said that issues like marital rape were difficult and that the government needed more consultations. This was, to put it mildly, perplexing. In modern times, the criminalisation of marital rape seems to be a very simple, logical, rational conclusion. In fact, one needs to perform several extraordinary feats of mental gymnastics to justify and legitimise the opposite. How is it that those who maintain that rape should attract the harshest punishment for the perpetrator suddenly find the act acceptable when a husband does it to a wife, as if a wedding is a Harry Potter-esque invisibility cloak that makes the crime disappear?

As a response to the government’s hedging on the issue, we posted the following comic on Facebook on February 9, 2013:

WSDP - Marital Rape

Now, I confess there are problems with this comic – it’s a little simplistic, and also Einstein might not have been the best choice to deliver this lesson as he was hardly the greatest husband in the world – but, the point was that it does not, or should not, take a genius to understand why the marital exception to rape should be removed.

A family that disrespects individual autonomy together…

And now, it seems the marital exception is one of those things the UPA and NDA governments agree upon. Well actually, while the former claimed that they were at least considering it, the latter seem to have ended the conversation altogether. Maneka Gandhi, the Minister for Women and Child Development has said, “It is considered that the concept of marital rape, as understood internationally, cannot be suitably applied in the Indian context due to various factors like level of education/illiteracy, poverty, myriad social customs and values, religious beliefs, mindset of the society to treat the marriage as a sacrament, etc.” This is a stunning departure from her position on the marital exception to rape just last year and the most puzzling argument I have ever heard about a legal issue. What does illiteracy or poverty have to do with amending a law that demonstrably causes physical and mental trauma to individuals? Did social customs and religious beliefs of some people stop the legislature from making laws against sati, child marriage, dowry and caste-based discrimination?

MaritalRape_CriminalLawAmenedment2012

The “mindset of the society to treat the marriage as a sacrament” point is an old one. The claim is that marriage is a sacred bond between a man and a woman (only between a man and a woman), and that the state has no business interfering in the domestic affairs of a married couple. This argument is woefully flimsy. Laws on domestic violence and divorce would not exist if the state did not think legal intervention was necessary even in a marriage.

A similar argument was used in a report on the recommendations of the Justice Verma Committee prepared by the Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs and presented in both houses in March, 2013. It stated that while some members had suggested that Section 375 of the Indian Penal Code should allow “some room for wife [sic] to take up the issue of marital rape”, that “no woman takes marriage so simple [sic] that she will just go and complain blindly” and that “consent in marriage cannot be consent forever”, several members “felt that the marital rape [sic] has the potential of destroying the institution of marriage.” The report went on to say that “In India, for ages, the family system has evolved and it is moving forward. Family is able to resolve the problems and there is also a provision under the law for cruelty against women. It was, therefore, felt that if the marital rape is brought under the law, the entire family system will be under great stress and the Committee may perhaps be doing more injustice.”

What this suggests is mind-bogglingly terrifying. It seems to assert that the foundation of an Indian family is not based on trust, love, equality, understanding, cooperation, mutual respect and interdependence. It is based on a skewed power structure where one partner gets to inflict violence on the body and mind of the other, where the success of the relationship depends on how much the partner with less power can endure. Imagine being punched in the stomach by your brother and then being told that you should just suck it up because the law says when your sibling hits you, it’s not assault. Now imagine that he beats you up whenever he pleases and you are told that this is not a crime being committed repeatedly on your body because surely, as a family, you can work things out. If you report him to the police, the family system in India will crumble. Surely, the preservation of the “Indian family” is more important than the physical and mental trauma being caused to you.

The Standing Committee consisted of 29 members at the time, none of whom had any specific experience or expertise in women’s issues. Only 3 of the members were women. One of them was Dr. Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar, a Trinamool leader who in December, 2012 had said that the gang rape of Suzette Jordan in Park Street, Kolkata “was not at all a rape case. It was a misunderstanding between the two parties involved between a lady and her client,” thus insinuating that Jordan was a sex worker. When the report was published, a dissenting note was appended to it, and among other things, it condemned the Standing Committee’s position on marital rape as unconstitutional and contrary to the Justice Verma Committee’s recommendations. The note was given by only two members of the Standing Committee: D. Raja and Prasanta Chatterjee, of the Communist Party of India and Communist Party of India (Marxist), respectively. No other member recorded dissent.

India’s relationship with its colonial era laws is simultaneously confounding and tragicomic. On the one hand we puff up our chests with pride when we think of our freedom struggle and victory over our colonial oppressors, and on the other hand we cling stubbornly and blindly to their archaic laws, which have no place in modern times – laws that even they have done away with. But what is truly depressing is that we undervalue women so much that we would rather grasp at half-baked fictions and outdated notions of family than address the real harm being done to real individuals in real time. We are only too happy to declare that our society is too primitive to accept modern ideas and then sacrifice the safety of women on the altar of our own apathy. Yes, laws are often only amended after there has been a change in social attitude towards the issue in question, but in India, we have also had a long history of enacting laws as instruments to bring about such social change. We can either embrace that history and move with the times or throw in our lot with a man who died four centuries ago and a belief that should have died with him.

(Sayak Dasgupta wanders around myLaw.net looking for things to do.)

Categories
Human Rights

Transfer system, mental capacity assessment in juvenile justice bill violate equality rights

ArleneManoharan_SwagataRaha_ShrutiRamakrishnan_CCLDisagreement on vital issues of constitutionality did not stop the passage of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Bill, 2014 (“the Bill”) in the Lok Sabha. Apart from the floor of the Parliament, these issues were also raised in submissions to the Parliamentary Standing Committee and in the print and visual media.

In a drastic and regressive move, the Bill proposes the introduction of a transfer system so that children aged between 16 and 18 years and alleged to have committed ‘heinous offences’ can now be tried and sentenced as adults.

The right to equality under Article 14 and the special protection for children under Article 15(3)

By treating adolescents as adults, the proposed system will incorrectly treat two distinct categories equally. This strikes at the very core of Article 14. The Supreme Court has repeatedly endorsed as part of the Article 14 mandate (See, M. Nagaraj v. Union of India, AIR 2007 SC 71 and Joginder Nath v. Union of India, AIR 1975 SC 511), the principle that injustice arises not only when equals are treated unequally, but also when unequals are treated equally.

This animation, comprised of MRI scans, show changes in the brain between the ages of 5 and 20. Red indicates more grey matter and blue indicates less.

This animation, comprised of MRI scans, shows changes in the brain between the ages of 5 and 20. Red indicates more grey matter and blue indicates less.

Advances in neuroscience show that adolescents are neurobiologically distinct from adults. Even though persons in this age group may ‘know what they are doing is wrong’, they have been shown incontrovertibly to be unable to act on that knowledge and restrain themselves. This is because they underestimate risk, are susceptible to negative influences, and lack foresight.

They are also more amenable to reform and rehabilitative interventions because of the plasticity of their brains. As stated in an amicus brief for the American Psychological Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the National Association of Social Workers before the Supreme Court of the United States in Miller v. Alabama, juveniles “typically outgrow their antisocial behaviour as the impetuousness and recklessness of youth subside in adulthood”.

The special protection of 16 to 18 year olds, present in the current law and negated by the Bill, is saved by Article 15(3) of the Constitution, which permits special legal provisions for women and children because uniform laws cannot address the particular vulnerability of women and children. The transfer system militates against this goal as well as the overall objective of the Bill to ensure care, protection, and the ultimate rehabilitation of children in conflict with the law.

The constitutional prohibition on procedural arbitrariness under Articles 14 and 21

The Bill requires the Juvenile Justice Board to assess, along with the circumstances in which the heinous offence was allegedly committed, whether the child offender had the physical and mental capability to commit the offence. The latest research indicates that individualised assessments of adolescent mental capacity are not possible. Any suggestion that it can be done would mean “exceeding the limits of science”. (See, Bonnie & Scott, “The Teenage Brain: Adolescent Research and the Law”, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(2) 158–161 (2013), p.161.)

The assessment proposed in the Bill is fraught with errors and arbitrariness and will allow inherent biases to determine which child is transferred to an adult court. The assessment also violates the principle of presumption of innocence as it operates on the assumption that the child has committed the offence.

Procedural arbitrariness is inherent in the assessment of reformation by the Children’s Court

When a juvenile sentenced by the Children’s Court attains the age of 21 years, she or he will be subjected to another assessment to determine whether or not the person has reformed and can make contributions to society.

Already, half the children apprehended for offences come from families with an annual income of less than Rs. 25,000 while only 0.55% of the children apprehended come from families with an annual income of more than Rs. 3,00,000 (See, Crime in India, 2013, Compendium, National Crime Records Bureau (2014), pg 4.) Undoubtedly, the provisions of the Bill will result in class, caste and religion-based targeting of children under the garb of assessing their potential contribution to society and extent of reformation.

Protection against disqualification violates the right to life under Article 21 and the right to equality under Article 14

Maneka Gandhi (right), the Union Minister for Women and Child Development introduced the Bill in the Lok Sabha. Shashi Tharoor spoke about the problems with treating 16-18 year olds as adults.

Maneka Gandhi (right), the Union Minister for Women and Child Development introduced the Bill in the Lok Sabha. Shashi Tharoor spoke about the problems with treating 16-18 year olds as adults.

Children between 16 and 18 years found to be in conflict with the law under Clause 20(1)(i) will incur disqualifications. While all children are protected against disqualification attached to conviction, the Bill deprives children convicted of heinous offences of this protection, thus discriminating among children based on the forum for trial, the offence, and the age.

They will therefore have to declare the conviction while applying for jobs or traveling abroad. The record of conviction will stigmatise them and make their rehabilitation and re-integration impossible.

The right to life entails the right to livelihood as well as a life of dignity. This stands compromised through the retention of the record of conviction and the withdrawal of protection from disqualification. This also means that a finding of ‘reformation’ and the ability to make a positive contribution to society based on another arbitrary assessment proposed under Clause 21 will be rendered meaningless, as the conviction will be held against the child for life.

The Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Human Resource Development also highlighted these constitutional concerns in its Two Hundred Sixty-Fourth Report. In para 3.21, it concluded that, “the existing juvenile system is not only reformative and rehabilitative in nature but also recognises the fact that 16-18 years is an extremely sensitive and critical age requiring greater protection. Hence, there is no need to subject them to different or adult judicial system as it will go against Articles 14 and 15(3) of the Constitution.

Policy consensus based on evidence has to precede law making in a Parliamentary democracy. Examples from western countries that have experimented with the transfer system show that such a policy change will only result in higher costs related to incarceration and the deferred costs of the rage and bitterness that come from life in the adult criminal justice system.

Sending juveniles who allegedly commit ‘serious’ crimes to jail on the pretext of public safety is not in the interest of children, families, or the wider community. Placing adolescents who are at a difficult transitional phase in their lives along with adult criminals will only serve to place these young people at risk of being physically, sexually and emotionally abused and being further criminalised. This regressive outcome is in stark contrast to our constitutional mandate and the rehabilitative aims outlined even in the preamble of this Bill.

Swagata Raha, Arlene Manoharan, and Shruthi Ramakrishnan are from the Centre for Child and the Law, NLSIU Bangalore.