Supreme Court of Pakistan prohibits execution of condemned prisoners with mental illnesses: A promising start towards reforming Pakistan’s death penalty problem?
On 10 February, 2021, a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court of Pakistan (SC) delivered its landmark judgement in Safia Bano v. Home Department (along with 2 consolidated cases). This...
Queensland Court to consider Australia’s first ‘climate change’ human rights case
As an increasing number of cases worldwide link climate change and human rights (for instance, see here), the first litigation of this kind in Australia is proceeding before Queensland’s Land...
Sadaf Aziz v. Federation of Pakistan: The end of virginity testing in Pakistan?
Across Pakistan, the two finger test (TFT), also known as the virginity and hymen test is conducted on female survivors and victims of rape and sexual abuse. It is a...
Eviction of forest-dwellers in Jammu and Kashmir: Procedural haemorrhage and rights violation
The Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) Committee on Forest Encroachments has recently published a list of forestland encroachers in the Union Territory (UT) pursuant to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) filed...
Reproductive Rights and Democracy in Poland
On 22 October 2020, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal held it was unconstitutional for a women to access abortion in cases where there was ‘a medical indication that there existed a...
Environmental protection of children’s right to life: ICCPR General Comment 36
As the indivisibility of human rights and environmental protection solidifies as a norm of international human rights law, children are increasingly claiming their right to environmental protection under domestic constitutions...
A drought-stricken and marginalised Tharparkar: The right to water and COVID-19 in Pakistan
The people of Tharparkar (Thar), Pakistan, called ‘Tharis’, have been facing water scarcity for years. In the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, the provision of quality water is essential. While...
The Need for Empathy: Understanding India’s COVID-19 Lockdown (with Kalpana Kannabiran)
“The question really, for me, is not so much one of the degree of deference that courts should grant the State, but the degree of empathy the court demonstrates towards...
Have Prisons In India Become Ticking Time Bombs Amidst COVID-19 Outbreak?
The Apex court in India, right from the latter half of the 20th Century till as late as March 2020, has upheld the status of prisoners as people who have...
Denial of the Right to Life in Kenya’s Urban Settlements
Over 56% of Kenya’s urban population live in informal settlements, with Kibera in Nairobi being Africa’s biggest slum. Within them, there are widespread instances of killings of young males by...
Dignity, the Right to Life, and the Coronavirus
The current coronavirus crisis has highlighted the weaknesses of UK law and the system of government. The Prime Minister spent weeks obfuscating. Each day he equivocated more and more people...
Supreme Court of Sri Lanka Recognises Custodial Death as a Violation of the Right to Life
In the landmark judgement of Rathnayake Tharanga Lakmali v Niroshan Abeykoon, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka held that the extra-judicial killing of a suspect in police custody violated the...
