HUMAN RIGHTS-Looking At Both The Sides

The Oxford dictionary defines Human Rights as “the rights of all human beings to fair treatment, justice and basic needs”. For me, personally, Human Rights are those rights which are given to a person without giving a second thought about neither his past nor his present. It may be a murderer or an accused, a man or a woman, an assassin or a saint, he/she gets Human Rights, the only criterion which requires fulfilment for getting these rights is that the person should be a “Human Being”. In every situation of justice delivery there is some Human Right or the other which is violated and what makes it more interesting is that, this violation may have taken place on either of the two sides involved.

The fields of Human Rights which interest me the most are Child Rights, Trafficking and Rights of HIV/AIDS Patients. The reason for interest in the first is because they constitute the most vulnerable section of the society. In spite of this, the society as a whole has taken very few or no steps with regards to changing things, a simple example for this is that the crimes against children are tried as the ones against adults except in the state of Goa, which has a separate cell to deal with crimes related to children. Trafficking for me is a violation of a person’s right to move about freely and live his life the way he wants to. The stigmatisation of HIV/AIDS patients and treating them as second-class citizens is a very unfortunate thing and can be done away with only by awareness. Even better laws for the protection of such patients in the society can be of great help, for example the law that HIV/AIDS patients cannot be called so but they have to be called Sero-+ve patients. We have to realise that after all AIDS is just another disease which does not have a cure, like Alzheimer's Disease.

Today in India with the booming economy and cut throat competition and hence tension and stress coming into the picture, Human Rights will have many more applications and hence its necessary to be vigilant and raise a voice against wrong doings of any one with respect to this issue. There is also the need to pat the backs of those who have fulfilled their duty with respect to Human Rights in spite of the odds. This leads to various NGOs dealing with Human Rights shouldering more responsibility by becoming more accountable to the society itself. The Government needs to put in more effort to control the situation of Human Rights violation in the country. Small steps taken by the Government machinery in the right direction can do a lot of good in finding a solution to the problem. Things like Police reforms, revamp in Child Rights Acts, social protection to victims of evils like trafficking and crimes on women and many other miniscule measures would mean a lot in overcoming various problems faced today.

Many a times we focus on Human Rights of one party while the other party, and the section of the society to which he/she belongs to, involved in the act of injustice is totally ignored and put to shame. For example, there are many people fighting for the rights of “criminals” killed in encounters but we will find very few fighting for the rights of soldiers in Siachen, who receive an amount as the High Altitude Allowance (HAA) which is less than the money paid to a person in jail for making furniture. There is no comparison between the two neither do I say that no one should fight against the atrocities on criminals or accused persons but we should give this a thought and decide for ourselves whether is right to pay a person almost dieing of cold to protect his motherland the same as you pay a person for doing some work while completing his punishment in jail? Agreed that its matter of Government policy, but isn’t it our duty to protect the Human Rights of any person irrespective of what work he is doing or which cult of the society he belongs to? We should realise that the person on the other side has also got human rights and some day the society will be affected if justice is not done to him, considering him to be JUST a “Human Being”.

According to me, the time has come when we should not just push the Government for providing a better environment for the fight against Human Rights violations but also look into our ways of dealing with people on the other side of the issue. There is a need to see the violations from the perspective of both the sides as all the people ultimately belong to the society. Come let’s broaden our view and try and solve the problems regarding Human Rights violations of all the sections of the society involved.