Kathmandu, Nepal, August 31, 2021:The three international rights organizations- Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) have urged the Nepal government to enforce Supreme Court (SC) rulings and permit the regular courts to try cases of enforced disappearance and other grave international crimes.
Issuing a joint statement on the occasion of International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances on Monday, the three international rights agencies have also urged Nepal’s international partners to stand with the victims of serious crimes under international law to press the Nepali government to uphold domestic and international legal obligations.
The SC had ordered the government in 2015 to investigate gross violations of human rights and international humanitarian law during the conflict era that remained from 1996 to 2006. In the order the SC had categorically stated to conduct a meaningful and effective transitional justice process to establish the truth and provide justice to the victims.
‘The Nepal government stands in blatant violation of express orders of the Supreme Court by failing to conduct a credible, timely transitional justice process,’ Mandira Sharma, ICJ’s senior international legal adviser for South Asia, states in the joint press statement.
‘The families of victims of enforced disappearance suffer deep anguish, not knowing what happened to their loved ones, while the Nepali government has used a sham transitional justice process to block their efforts to discover the truth,’ Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia director at Human Rights Watch has stated ‘the current process does not provide truth, reconciliation, justice, or accountability, but instead shields perpetrators and denies victims their rights.’
Likewise, Dinushika Dissanayake, deputy South Asia director at Amnesty International states ‘a credible process to establish the fate of the disappeared and provide justice, truth, and reparation for these and other crimes needs to earn the trust of victims and place their needs at its hearts instead, transitional justice has been treated as a political bargaining chip to be bartered in opaque negotiations between politicians since the war ended 15 years ago.’
As part of the transitional justice process to investigate civil war abuses as envisaged in the Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) signed in 2006 between the major seven political parties and then Maoist rebellion to end the decade long conflict, the government had formed the Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) and Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2015.
As laws related to the two transitional justice mechanism passed in 2014 from the parliament had authorized these two commissions to recommend amnesty and mediate cases, even in situations involving grave crimes and gross violations of human rights, including enforced disappearances, the SC had struck down the provisions in 2015 ordering the government to amend the acts. The government had petitioned to overturn the SC ruling. But the SC had rejected the petition in April 2020.
As the government failed to amend in the laws as per the SC verdict, the United Nations has also declined to engage with Nepal’s transitional justice bodies even stating that they do not meet basic international legal standards, especially with respect to the broad provisions to grant amnesty to perpetrators.
Though the CIEDP had published a list of 2,506 people, who had allegedly forcibly disappeared, it had failed to determine the incident that had happened and who was accountable for the crime. Likewise, the TRC had also published a report of over 60,000 complaints of abuses from the conflict era sans completing the investigation of a single case.
The International Committee of the Red Cross had published a report stating that 1,333 people are still missing in connection with the armed conflict in Nepal. Only 1,227 disappeared persons’ families have been provided one million Nepalese rupees in compensation
