Jaskaran Kaur

Jaskaran Kaur is a human rights lawyer and writer who co-founded Ensaaf, the US-based non-profit that documents mass state crimes in India and works to end impunity for them. The 2006 author note in her report calls her co-founder and co-director of Ensaaf, and her Echoing Green profile speaks of twenty years of co-founding and co-running it. The profile is undated, but twenty years from Ensaaf's start in 2004, which its own site gives, puts those words long after the 2006 fellowship. The same note says she is a graduate of Yale University and Harvard Law School; SikhRI's profile says she graduated with distinction. She is best known in this record for Twenty Years of Impunity, Ensaaf's report on the November 1984 pogrom, and for her part in Reduced to Ashes, the report on Punjab's disappearances.

Her work, in order

• 2001: she went to Punjab on a Harvard Human Rights Program summer fellowship to study how the Punjab and Haryana High Court handled habeas corpus petitions filed by families of the disappeared; the study was published in the Harvard Human Rights Journal (author note).
• May 2003: Reduced to Ashes: The Insurgency and Human Rights in Punjab, Final Report: Volume One, is published in Kathmandu by the South Asia Forum for Human Rights, for the Committee for Coordination on Disappearances in Punjab. Its title page names Ram Narayan Kumar with Amrik Singh, Ashok Agrwaal and Jaskaran Kaur; her later author note calls her a contributing author. Human Rights Watch described the 634-page volume as documenting 672 disappearance cases pending before the National Human Rights Commission.
• 2004: Ensaaf begins its work (its website says “Since 2004”) and she co-founds it with Sukhman Singh Dhami. The first edition of Twenty Years of Impunity appears in the same period; the second edition's preface says two years had passed since it.
• October 2006: the second edition of Twenty Years of Impunity adds a supplement, “Stonewalling Justice: The Nanavati Report and its Aftermath”, on the Nanavati report, the Government's Action Taken Report and the Prime Minister's apology. Its preface says the book analyses the evidence that was before both the Misra and Nanavati commissions and “clearly demonstrates that senior Congress (I) party officials and police sponsored, organized, and executed the November 1984 massacres of Sikhs”. That is Ensaaf's conclusion, not a court's.
• 2006: Echoing Green Global Fellow. Her Echoing Green profile, written long after the fellowship, says that, after about twenty years of co-founding and co-running Ensaaf, she moved on to other non-profit work.

What she is remembered for: a report that draws on affidavits, official inquiry reports and press accounts of the November 1984 killings, and the organisation she helped found to carry that work on.