South Asia Citizens Web

The undersigned civil society organizations find the deportation of the three members of the PDF who sought medical treatment in Thailand to the BGF forces under the command of the hostile Myanmar army knowing full well that the three of them were vulnerable to fatal treatment including torture and persecution is a violation of Section 13 of the Act on Prevention and Suppression of Torture and Enforced Disappearance 2022 which came into force in Thailand since 22 February 2023 following our ascension to the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment (UNCAT). Section 13 clearly stipulates that

I am not competent to discuss the work of Vivan Sundaram, the brilliant painter and installation-artist who passed away on March 29. But I must still write about him because not doing so for a person who has so enriched my life would be utterly invidious.

75 years after independence what is the State of our nation today? A private group of lawyers and citizens have taken the initiative to research and bring out a report which gives us an indication of the present state of affairs in the nation, in the context of various Ram Navami and Hanuman Jayanti processions that were taken out in April 2022

The recent decision of the National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) to drop entire chapters from the history textbooks for class 12, as well as from other classes and to delete statements from other textbooks is a matter of deep concern. Using the period of the pandemic-cum-lockdowns to argue that there was a need to lighten the load of the curriculum, the NCERT initiated a contentious process of dropping topics like the history of the Mughal courts, the 2002 communal riots in Gujarat, the Emergency, mention of Dalit writers, the Naxalite movement, and the fight for equality from school social science, history, and political science textbooks of classes 6 to 12.

Lahore, 7 April 2023. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) notes with considerable alarm that Balochistan faces mounting public frustration pertaining to enforced disappearances, economic exclusion, curbs on press freedom, misgovernance and allegations of political manipulation by the establishment. A fact-finding mission led by HRCP in October 2022 has observed a palpable sense of anger among ordinary citizens, many of whom went so far as to refer to Balochistan as a