As member of the UN Human rights council, India’s performance of scrutinizing the human rights records of other countries has improved slightly, as it tries to move away its critical eye from mainly parsing HR violations by European nations to other parts of the world, a report said on Friday.
The Asian Centre for Human Rights has reviewed India’s performance in Universal Periodic Review, which found that India has improved in its participation of UPR of countries, and also in making comments and recommendations.
During the first cycle of UPR which ran from 2008 to 2011, India participated in the UPR process of 107 countries - in total, 191 nations had their human rights records reviewed. While, it asked comments and questions from 29 countries, it did make 38 recommendations to 28 countries. Out of the 28, 16 were from Europe alone. In contrast, in the ongoing second cycle of UPR which began from 2012 until May 3 this year, India reviewed 55 countries, including Sri Lanka were reviewed, while it made 37 recommendations to 19 countries.
“Its geographical focus during the second cycle is improving and it is a step in the right direction,” said ACHR’s Suhas Chakma.
In the second cycle, India had asked Sri Lanka for “credible” investigations into the allegations including Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation committee and noted that there was a ‘time-bound action plan’ to implement its suggestions.
To most of the European countries, the recommendations and comments were mostly related to adherence to international treaties. It had also raised the issue of freedom of religion with France, Germany and Netherlands.