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UN Put Pressures On Nepal To Act On Human Rights Violations
By KTM Metro Reporter
October 11, 2012: in an interview given to the Australian Radio, Rory Mungoven: Chief of Asia Pacific Section of UN High Commissioner for Human Rights says that the United Nations is putting pressure on Nepal to start the process of bringing those responsible for serious human rights violations during the bloody conflict to justice. Six years after the decade-long conflict came to an end, promised mechanisms to deal with the truth, justice and reconciliation issue have not been established, yet.
Now, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has released a landmark report documenting the serious violations of international law that occurred during the period to protests from the government in Kathmandu.
One of the cases perhaps the best documented by the UN is that of the Bhairabnath battalion in Kathmandu, and recently we've had news that the officer in charge of that battalion, alleged to have taken Maoists or suspected Maoists, tortured them and they've since disappeared, presumed dead, that officer has now been promoted within the army despite calls for his prosecution. What does this say about impunity in Nepal today?
Answering to the question, Mungoven says, “You know of the 9,000 cases covered in this archive and in this report, there's not been yet a single prosecution of human rights violation by either side since the signing of the peace accord. And the danger is all of this is beginning to slip away, the deals are being struck, arrangements are being made and we begin to see some of the people believed to have perpetrated very serious crimes quietly being promoted or assigned to new positions. We're seeing successive governments withdraw cases that were before the Nepali courts; to have them withdraw by the Attorney General. We've also seen the government now begin to, at least propose that the future truth commission should have very broad powers to grant amnesty for very serious crimes. Amnesty may have a place for lower order offences or smaller incidents, but not for crimes of disappearance, crimes of murder, crimes of rape, and we're talking here the rape of minors, many of them under the age of 15. These are crimes that in international law, in terms of Nepal's own law, in terms of the determinations of Nepal's own Supreme Court should properly be prosecuted and not be the subject of amnesty.”
