The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) is preparing to defend the government’s human rights processes at a meeting in Geneva this week, where a decision on whether India’s human rights body will retain its “A status” is expected to be made. The NHRC’s ratings were put on hold in 2023 over concerns on its composition procedure, the presence of police personnel in human rights investigations, and the lack of gender and minority representation, and the decision over whether the NHRC is given an A rating or a B rating would affect its ability to vote at the UN Human Rights Council and some UNGA bodies.
The meeting of the Sub-Committee on Accreditation (SCA) of the UN-recognised Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) worldwide will be held on May 1, official sources told The Hindu, as part of the five-year peer review for each member of the 114-member alliance. While NHRC Chairperson, retired Supreme Court judge Justice Arun Kumar Mishra had travelled to Geneva last year for the GANHRI SCA meeting on India, this year, the NHRC is expected to attend the review meeting on Wednesday online. The Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) is understood to have reached out to various countries involved in the review process to make its case through diplomatic channels.
This is the second time the Modi government is facing a possible listing downgrade. Since being accredited in 1999, India had retained its A ranking in 2006 and 2011, while its status was deferred in 2016 and restored after a year. According to a six-point submission by the SCA in March 2023, the NHRC has failed to create conditions required to be “able to operate independent of government interference”. In the submission, the committee had slammed India for the involvement of police officers in its investigative process, calling it a “conflict of interest”.
