Amnesty International

Amnesty International is a worldwide human rights organisation, founded in 1961 by Peter Benenson and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977. In the history of Punjab it is an outside witness: it published its own findings on police abuses, disappearances and the case of Jaswant Singh Khalra, and it also recorded abuses by armed groups.

Its summary of the decade: In 1999 Amnesty said that between 1983 or 1984 and 1994 armed groups were responsible for widespread abuses, including the killing of thousands of civilians and hostage-taking, and that there were widespread allegations that police illegally detained, tortured, "disappeared" and extra-judicially executed hundreds of young men. It added that human rights groups, itself among them, were branded "terrorist" sympathisers for raising such cases.

Key reports and statements

• 9 May 1991: "India: Human rights violations in Punjab: use and abuse of the law" described arrests, torture, disappearances and killings by police and security forces since 1983.
• 26 March 1992: "India: Torture, rape and deaths in custody" recorded 415 deaths in detention since 1987 across India, and said such abuses were most common in regions of armed conflict, Punjab among them.
• 15 August 1994: a memorandum to the Government of India after a visit on 5 to 15 January 1994. Reduced to Ashes, the final report of the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab (CCDP), quotes Amnesty as complaining that none of the recommendations of the commissions on the November 1984 killings of Sikhs had been implemented.
• 7 September 1995: an urgent action on the disappearance of Jaswant Singh Khalra, a day after he was seized.
• April 1998: "India: A mockery of justice". Amnesty said Khalra was one of the defenders it highlighted in its campaign for the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It reported that four accused police officers still worked in Tarn Taran despite a Supreme Court order, that the witness Kikkar Singh had been implicated by police in five criminal cases, and that Paramjit Kaur Khalra, Khalra's wife, had been charged with trying to bribe a witness. The CCDP's report says the government soon quashed the charges against her.
• 1999: "India: A vital opportunity to end impunity in Punjab" said the National Human Rights Commission had made no comprehensive investigation in the two and a half years since the Supreme Court's referral. Amnesty called the NHRC's order of 13 January 1999 the minimum role the Commission could play.
• 6 September 2000: "Arrest of witness points to continuing police harassment", which the CCDP's report ties to the arrest of Rajiv Singh, a witness to Khalra's abduction.

Its place in this history: Amnesty's reports are among the outside records cited in the CCDP's final report. Amnesty's April 1998 report said the campaign around Khalra's Supreme Court petition had mobilised lawyers and human rights activists in the state to form the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab. Amnesty remains a worldwide movement; the reports found for this page cover its Punjab work only to 2000.