The country Human Rights reports-2018

Why is it in news?
  • The country Human Rights reports for 2018 were released as part of an annual exercise in which the U.S. State Department submits its assessment of such rights as per the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to the U.S. Congress.
More in news
  • Coverage of issues in report: The 2018 India report covers a range of issues including press and media freedoms, forced disappearances, custodial deaths and the NGO clampdown-which became an issue between the U.S. and India, after the NDA government cancelled licenses of some 15,000 NGOs under the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act.
  • Restrictions on foreign funding of some NGOs: The government imposed restrictions on foreign funding of some nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including those with views the government stated were not in the “national interest,” thereby curtailing the work of these NGO.
  • Report findings:
    (1) Custodial deaths: In terms of custodial deaths, the Report cites official (Indian) figures of 1,674 cases of such death between August 2017 and February 2018, with 1,530 occurring in judicial custody and 144 in police custody.
    (2) Role of the Police and Security Apparatus: The report says, Police continue to be overpaid, underworked, and subject to political pressure, in some cases contributing to corruption.
    (3) Press freedom and the safety of journalists:
  • Report says, there were numerous instances of journalists and members of media being threatened or killed in response to their reporting.
  • Police rarely identified suspects involved in the killing of journalists.
  1. Editorial freedoms:
  • Report says, The Editors Guild of India claimed the government limited press freedom by exerting political pressure and blocking television transmissions.
  • It cited the firing of The Tribune’s Editor-in-Chief Harish Khare after reported government pressure on the newspaper following its report on privacy and security flaws in the Aadhaar program.
  • The report quotes the 2018 World Press Freedom Index as saying online trolling and attacks on journalists was a major issue.
Source
The Hindu




Posted by Jawwad Kazi on 20th Mar 2019
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