Deccan Chronicle: Bangalore: Thursday, 31 July 2014.
It’s been a
long wait for human rights activists. In 10 months of BJP regime and 15 months
of Congress rule, there were three Chief Ministers, and two Deputy Chief
Ministers but not a single Karnataka State Human Rights Commission (KSHRC)
chairperson.
Instead the
government did a shoddy job of appointing Meera Saksena on June 23, 2014 as the
acting chairperson. She was initially appointed as a member to the Chairperson.
It has been
two years since S R Nayak resigned as the chairperson and still there has not
been any effort from the government to make a permanent appointment of the
KSHRC chairperson.
After the
controversy of the appointment of Darmar Murgeshan as the KSHRC chairperson,
human rights activist Narashima Murthy met the CM on many occasions. The CM gave the excuse of lack of candidates
and said the search was on.
However, an
RTI report has revealed that as of now, 17 Supreme Court judges and 9 chief
justices from various courts have retired since 2012 January onwards.
Speaking with
Deccan Chronicle, Narashima Murthy says, “So many candidates are available.
Then why is the government not taking any initiative in this regard? Meera
Saksena is an IAS officer, a bureaucrat and she does not qualify for the post.
We need someone who can apply his or her judicial mind. In a short span of time
there were so many rape cases, but the acting chairperson, who is a woman, did
not visit even one case. Besides, a Chairperson should be person who is, or has
been, a Judge of the Supreme Court or who is, or has been, the Chief Justice of
a High Court.”
Till May
2014, over 16,000 cases are pending. The human rights activists will submit a
petition to the Chief Minister to quash the appointment of Meera Saksena and
make a fixed appointment of the chairperson.
The petition
has 100 signatures of human right activists like Doreswamy, Girish Karnad,
Chandrashekar Patil, G. K. Govind Rao, Dona Fernandes and the like. “A
chairperson is important in cases which involve custodial deaths and so on,”
concluded Murthy. Let’s hope the government sees the light and quickly appoints
one!