South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR)

The South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) is a regional human rights organisation based in Kathmandu, Nepal. Wikipedia, the only account of its founding that loaded, says it was created in 1990 after the Third World Congress on Human Rights held in New Delhi in December 1990, where representatives of more than fifty NGOs saw the need for a regional view, and that its council includes about 40 partner organisations.

Its publications: by 2003 the front matter of Reduced to Ashes lists a SAFHR paper series of thirteen titles, among them number 10, A Complex Denial: Disappearances, Secret Cremations and the Issue of Truth and Justice in Punjab. It also lists regional volumes, among them Shrinking Space: Minority Rights in South Asia, and the quarterly Refugee Watch, published from 1998 with the Calcutta Research Group.

Its part in the Punjab story

• May 2003: SAFHR published Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab, Final Report: Volume One, by Ram Narayan Kumar with Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur, prepared for the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab. The copyright page gives SAFHR's address as GPO Box 12855, Kathmandu.
• Its secretary-general, Tapan Bose, wrote the introduction. The book describes him as a founder member of the Committee for Information and Initiative on Punjab, which it says has been leading human rights research in Punjab since 1988, and says that SAFHR undertook both to publish the report and to coordinate the follow-up to its release.
• The introduction sets out SAFHR's goals in bringing out the report: to give victims a voice, to strengthen the National Human Rights Commission's efforts on the secret cremations that the Supreme Court sent it in December 1996, to shift the discussion from rhetoric to the facts and the law, to create a national memory of mass atrocities based on verifiable records, and to ask the international community to press India to protect fundamental rights.

Where it stands: the sources found carry SAFHR's own activity only to 2004 and do not say whether it is still active.