PRESS RELEASE, December 10, 2013
Thma-U-Rangli-Juki (TUR), a progressive people’s organisation, will hold a street corner meeting on the draconian Meghalaya Preventive Detention Act (MPDA), 1995 and Meghalaya Maintenance of Public Order Act (MMPO) to observe International Human Rights Day on 10th December at Khyndai Lad, Shillong at 2 p.m. This will kick off the state wide campaign against attacks on people’s right to protest and expose the blatant misuse of these black laws by a corrupt and authoritarian State Government to silence any form of dissent and the government’s constant illegal infringement on the civil and political liberties of the people of the state. TUR invites all citizens to join this meeting and share their views and experiences.
TUR’s POSITION PAPER
CHALLENGE THE DRACONIAN BLACK LAWS IN MEGHALAYA
10th December, International Human Rights Day, is the day commemorating the adoption of Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948. UDHR represents the universal recognition that all of us are born free and our basic rights and fundamental freedoms cannot be taken away by anyone.
But in Meghalaya, International Human Rights Day has been reduced to either government organizations taking oaths to protect human rights or some well funded NGO organizing some meaningless pageantry and competitions like Run from Human Rights or a rally where people hold unread placards. But these managed events hide rampant violations of human rights that our system condones. Consider just some of them:
- Forcible Destruction of people’s houses in Umsawli for the New Shillong Township
- Custodial Deaths in Jowai Police Station
- Increasing unlawful surveillance and invasion of privacy of citizens
- Attack on freedom of expression by prosecuting opinions expressed in the press and social media and banning of films
- Extralegal murders through Fake Encounters
The list can go on and on. Rather than protecting people’s human rights and expanding their freedoms, the Meghalaya government actually presides over a regime of systemic and systematic everyday violations of people’s Rights. For instance, laws like the Meghalaya Preventive Detention Act (MPDA), 1995 and Meghalaya Maintenance of Public Order Act (MMPO), are laws that have institutionalized human rights violations. If International Human Rights Day has to have any meaning in Meghalaya, we have to start challenging these legal cultures of ‘rights violation’.
The government claims that these laws are needed to ensure peace and security of the people. But experience has shown that these draconian black laws give the government unlimited power to choose the group, the section, the political opinion to label as criminal and to attack with ‘legal’ violence of preventive detention, legal ostracism and financial extortion. For example, apart from many innocent lives it has destroyed, MPDA has been (ab)used to arrest carjackers, pickpockets, people protesting government corruption and uranium mining, common thieves and small time mischief makers. The range of ‘criminals’ that MPDA seeks to detain reveals the unlimited authoritarian nature of the law.
These laws are designed to be abused, because they subvert every tenet of democratic norms. They violate constitutional rights and legal provisions meant to protect the individual. By suspending all the legal safeguards for the individual, who is asked to prove his/her innocence without any legal representation or knowledge of the crime s/he is supposed to have committed, laws like MPDA are a nightmarish erasure of all that is considered civilized legal behaviour.
These laws define Unlawful Activities in such a vague manner, as to allow the government to get away with anything, and forcing common citizens to live under a state of constant fear and rather that ensuring security makes all and sundry insecure. People don’t know which act of theirs could be declared ‘illegal’ by the government. In spite of blatant disregard of Human Rights by the state, the propaganda machinery of the government, including its many civil society collaborators, project those charged under these laws as dangerous criminals. These public misinformation campaigns then feed the sense of public fear and insecurity. This state of fear allows the powerful to get away with any abuse of their position and power. These draconian black laws are designed not to provide peace and security to the people but to create a permanent condition of fear, insecurity and public disorder.
Existence of laws like MPDA and MMPO in our state has slowly and silently eroded legal procedures and constrained democratic spaces by curbing the individual and collective expression of dissent. The logical outcome of such arbitrary laws then is to push through anti-people development policies by the government and to silence people at large when those policies threaten their land, resources, and livelihood, allowing the elites to protect their privileges and push forward their plans which will usher in grave inequalities.
For further information, please contact email: angelatarun@gmail.com, akharshiing@yahoo.com and phone: +91-9863097754
Asian Human Rights Commission
Hong Kong
