By Mandeep Tiwana, CIVICUS Secretary General and Susan Marx, Chiefs Programmes Officer
Across authoritarian regimes and even democracies, state apparatuses frequently achieve the same outcome through formal legal machinery: weaponizing extraordinary counterterror statutes in the name of national security, imposing endless pre-trial detention, and relying on procedural delays to remove dissenting voices from the public sphere.
Nowhere is this tension between extraordinary security legislation and constitutional safeguards more evident than in India’s handling of civil society advocates exposing the most serious human rights violations. As we speak, a film dedicated to the life of Jaswant Singh Khalra – who exposed enforced disappearances in Punjab in the 1990s and who himself became a victim of enforced disappearance – has been banned by the Indian government.
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