Sikh Activists

Sikh representatives that organise the annual World Sikh Lobby today pledged that they were determined to make the recently established links with independent human rights experts at the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva work to expose India’s human rights violations.

The statement came after a meeting in Geneva with those representing the Special Rapporteur on human rights while countering terrorism. The meeting took place just before India’s human rights record came under its first-ever Universal Periodic Review (UPR) with the UNHRC.

The 3-hour UPR was webcast live against India’s wishes and by being made publicly available has exposed the new system of universal periodic review that commenced at the start of the week is flawed, as it grants excessive control over the outcome to the state under review.

In theory holding debates on countries was supposed to help activists to shine an international spotlight on human rights violations, and to challenge government responses that are inadequate or false. However, today’s three-hour session on India offered little in the way of proper scrutiny. The most significant criticism of the proceeding was the session ignored the detailed NGO submissions, such as from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch regarding subjects such as torture and extrajudicial killings.

The most important outcome was that the exceptions to this were Peter Gooderham, the UK Government representative, Terry Cormier, the Canadian Government representative, Mrs. Anna Chambers, the US Government representative and Ms. Nathalie Kohli, the Swiss Government represemntative and a number of other Western democracies who posed difficult questions. All four challenged Swashpawan Singh, Permanent Representative of India to the United Nations and many concluded that the responses to the points raised were inadequate.

It will not be lost on those that watch the 3-hour session that is available worldwide on Channel 5 on www.un.org/webcast that it was countries where Sikhs have been lobbying the most – UK, Canada, USA and Switzerland that are taking the lead in challenging India. However, other countries are slowly picking up on some of the key issues e g. use of torture by the police and armed forces. India will be concerned by these latest developments by those lobbying both nationally and through the UN.

It is clear from the webcast that India is trying to counter the Sikh lobby by using Sikh faces to either defend India’s position or by having a few 'friendly' Sikhs sit in silence and simply observe the proceedings. They could quite easily have done this sitting at home.