More than a year since the final list of Assam’s National Register of Citizens was released on August 31, 2019, the government has neither...
More than a year since the final list of Assam’s National Register of Citizens was released on August 31, 2019, the government has neither formally notified it nor issued orders to reject it. This has left the 1,906,657 excluded persons and their families in a state of excruciating uncertainty. Without the orders, they cannot appeal against their exclusion.
The government defends the National Register of Citizens as a mechanism to identify undocumented migrants, particularly Bangladeshis, but at the diplomatic level, it maintains that the register is a purely internal matter. Operating detention centres in a legal vacuum, it interned thousands of people declared as foreigners. And had it not been for successive court orders, those people would still be under detention.
If the government continues down its reckless path, millions of people – rendered stateless and at risk of indefinite detention – will be deprived of their human rights. Taking a grave view of the NRC process, United Nations experts expressed concern over its human rights implications in May 2019. Five months later, in August 2019, Genocide Watch expressed alarm at the ethnically-driven deprivation of nationality for millions and the risk of their imprisonment. And yet, the Indian state continues to disregard all criticism as well as its national and international legal obligations.
What are these obligations? The Centre for Public...
