Chhattisgarh Killings

• Published in: Economic and political weekly
• Main Author: Burra, Srinivas
• Format: Journal Article Magazine Article
• Language: English
• Published: Mumbai Athena Information Solutions Pvt. Ltd 18.08.2012
• Subjects: Capital punishment; Criminal law; Defense; Geneva Conventions; Human rights; International law; Law enforcement; Murders & murder attempts; Politics; India
• ISSN: 0012-9976

The non-derogable character of the right to life impregnates it with the indispensable obligation on the part of the State to put its actions, which deprive a person the right to life, to the test of all existing legal mechanisms. [...]any action by the state agencies which leads to the death of a person should be justied in accordance with substantive and procedural law and that should ideally happen by subjecting those actions to judicial scrutiny. [...]it is legitimately expected that security forces have to use extraordinary caution whenever there is a possibility of taking away the life of other persons in self-defence. In situations of law and order, the applicable law is domestic criminal law and a human rights framework in which there is no category of armed conict and hence no possibility of the status of com batants. [...]killing a Maoist cannot be justied by merely projecting them as combatants for selective operational purposes without recognising the situation as a non-international armed conict. [...]any action by security forces should meet the domestic law requirements and the killing of Maoists can happen only through the use of force for self-defence.