‘State must safeguard rights’

Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission Justice K.G. Balakrishnan said on Wednesday that the state was bound to protect not only human rights but also civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of people. He was inaugurating a threeday Open Hearing and Camp Sitting of the NHRC on matters of human rights violations related to the people of AP and Telangana at Dr MCR HRD Institute in the city. Maintaining that poor and marginalised people needed the state’s support for protection of their rights, he said that the Commission had planned to conduct hearings in the erstwhile AP two years ago but it had got delayed due to the elections and the division of the state. Referring to building the new capital of AP as a gigantic task, he said that the people could not be asked to wait for their rights for the lack of infrastructure. He added that the commission had received 98,666 applications in 2014 across the nation and to hear all these cases, the NHRC was conducting camp sittings in all states.

In his introductory remarks, NHRC registrar A.K. Garg said that they had noticed that atrocities on Scheduled Castes and Tribes were being committed in one form or the other across the country.

Citing that AP and TS were Naxal-infested, he said if the voices of the poor were not heard, they might become vulnerable to the influence of Naxals. Mr Garg added that it had come to the notice of the NHRC that in 23 villages of Gujarat, Dalits were boycotted and in some villages of Tamil Nadu, there were separate pathways for forward communities and the SCs.