National Human Rights Commission

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is India's statutory human rights body. Wikipedia says it was constituted on 12 October 1993 under the Protection of Human Rights Ordinance of 28 September 1993 and given a statutory basis by the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993. Justice Ranganath Misra was its first chairperson.

The Punjab reference: On 12 December 1996 the Supreme Court sent the Punjab police cremations case to the Commission, after the CBI's report disclosed, in the Court's words, a "flagrant violation of human rights on a mass scale". The order asked the Commission "to have the matter examined in accordance with law and determine all the issues", and said any compensation awarded would be "binding and payable". The Commission took it up on 2 January 1997 as Reference Case No. 1 of 1997.

Key moments

• 4 August 1997: the Commission held that it was a designate of the Supreme Court with the Court's own Article 32 powers. The Union Government went back to the Court, which on 10 September 1998 dismissed its petition, saying the Commission "is given a free hand".
• 13 January 1999: the Commission confined itself to the 2,097 cremations that the CBI said were carried out at three crematoria in Amritsar district.
• July 2004: a public notice in The Tribune described the inquiry as covering 2,097 bodies cremated as unclaimed or unidentified in the Amritsar, Majitha and Tarn Taran police districts between June 1984 and December 1994.
• November 2004 onwards: Human Rights Watch says that over more than ten years of proceedings the Commission compensated the next of kin of 1,051 people for the wrongful cremation of their relatives and of 194 for the violation of the right to life.
• 9 October 2006: the Commission appointed retired Justice K.S. Bhalla as a commissioner to hold an inquiry at Amritsar to identify the remaining victims on the CBI lists, Human Rights Watch says.

The criticism: Reduced to Ashes was prepared for the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab, whose authors took part in the proceedings. They write that the Commission "has made no attempt to reach the victim families" and that after six years it had examined no single case and heard no single victim. The Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab, the petitioner, challenged the limit of 2,097 several times before the Commission and in the Supreme Court, which refused to intervene at that stage. Human Rights Watch, in its 2007 report, says the Commission refused to investigate a single case of illegal cremation, relied on the Punjab police for identification, and awarded compensation on a principle of strict liability without naming any officer. It argues that the limit left out victims of disappearance, of other methods of disposal, of other districts, and of years before 1984 or after 1994. The sources found do not give the Commission's own reasons.