National Human Rights Commission

The National Human Rights Commission is the institution India built to hold itself to account for how its own agencies treat its own citizens. It was created by ordinary statute rather than by the Constitution, given the investigative apparatus of a civil court and none of the enforcement apparatus of one, and placed under an appointments process the executive controls. Its international peers have now formally recommended its downgrade. The question is not whether it has failed, but how much of the failure was written into the design.

From natural rights to a statutory definition of human rights

• The idea that individuals hold rights the state did not create and cannot withdraw is usually traced to John Locke, who argued that individuals in the state of nature are born with pre-existing natural rights to life, liberty and property, which precede government; government is a trust to secure them, and a ruler who violates them forfeits the authority to rule.
• That list is the foundation of rights talk and the standard target of criticism.
  • It defines human rights too narrowly: life, liberty and property are protections against interference, and a person free from arbitrary arrest but starving, illiterate or landless enjoys them fully without living a dignified life.
  • The twentieth century therefore pushed toward a broader conceptualisation — rights to work, education, health and an adequate standard of living, and the collective rights of peoples to self-determination.
• The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) captured that widening, and the covenants of 1966, the ICCPR and the ICESCR, split it into two treaty regimes. India ratified both in 1979.

How Indian law defines human rights

• The Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993 does not adopt the narrow list. Section 2(1)(d) defines human rights as the rights relating to life, liberty, equality and dignity of the individual guaranteed by the Constitution or embodied in the International Covenants and enforceable by courts in India.
• Two features of that definition are load-bearing.
  • It is anchored in dignity, not only non-interference, bringing the directive-principles vocabulary within reach.
  • It incorporates international covenant rights by reference — Section 2(1)(f) naming the ICCPR and ICESCR, widened by the 2006 amendment to other UN covenants the central government may specify — so its jurisdiction extends beyond rights separately legislated or constitutionalised in India.
• The practical effect is a mandate wider than the Fundamental Rights chapter: the Commission may take up a claim grounded in a treaty obligation India has accepted even where no domestic statute gives effect to it. The qualifier “enforceable by courts in India” is the limiting clause, and read strictly it collapses the covenant limb back into domestic law.

A commission’s reach is set first by its definition of rights, and India chose a definition far more generous than the powers it then handed over.

The Paris Principles and the idea of a national human rights institution

• A national human rights institution (NHRI) is a body created by the state, funded by the state, and designed to criticise the state. That paradox is the whole problem of institutional design in this field.
• The international template emerged from a workshop of national institutions held in Paris in October 1991, was endorsed by the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1992, and was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in Resolution 48/134 of 20 December 1993 — the same year India legislated.
• The Paris Principles are organised under four headings, and each guards against a distinct failure.
  • Competence and responsibilities — as broad a mandate as possible, fixed in constitutional or legislative text, with power to advise on laws and treaty compliance on its own initiative.
  • Composition and guarantees of independence and pluralism — appointment by a procedure guaranteeing pluralist representation of civil society, NGOs, professional bodies and experts, and a stable mandate fixed by law.
  • Methods of operation — freedom to hear any person, obtain any information, consult other bodies and address public opinion directly.
  • Quasi-jurisdictional competence, where individual complaints are heard — conciliation, binding decisions where the law allows, and referral.

The six criteria accreditation actually applies

• The accreditation process run by the Global Alliance of National Human Rights Institutions (GANHRI) compresses the Principles into six operational tests, and these are the ones India is measured against.
  • A broad mandate and competence grounded in statute or the Constitution.
  • Autonomy from government in decision-making and daily operation.
  • Independence guaranteed by statute or constitution, including security of tenure and immunity for official acts.
  • Pluralism in composition — gender, region, ethnicity, religion and professional background.
  • Adequate resources — its own budget, staff and premises, so that it is not administratively parasitic on a ministry.
  • Adequate powers of investigation, including power to compel evidence and to investigate through personnel it controls.
• Read against those six, the body the 1993 Act actually created was intended to do three things.
  • Play an advisory role on government policy in matters of human rights.
  • Monitor allegations of violation of human rights by the state — the state being both the creator and the principal subject of the institution.
  • Be independent and autonomous with a pluralistic composition, so that its advice and its monitoring carry credibility that a departmental grievance cell could not.

Why India legislated when it did

• The timing was not accidental. The early 1990s were the peak years of insurgency in Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir and of counter-insurgency in the North-East, and India faced sustained criticism at the UN Commission on Human Rights. A domestic institution let India argue that allegations should be addressed within the national system rather than internationalised, and critics therefore read the founding as defensive and reputational.
• The Statement of Objects and Reasons said better arrangements were needed through which human rights issues could be addressed independently of the government, in a manner underlining the government’s commitment to protecting them. Both halves of that sentence are true at once, and the tension between them is the Commission’s permanent condition.

The Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993: how the Commission was created

• The Commission has an unusually precise birth sequence, and the sequence itself signals urgency.
  • An Ordinance was promulgated on 28 September 1993.
  • The Commission was constituted on 12 October 1993, which it still observes as its foundation day, with Justice Ranganath Misra, a former Chief Justice of India, as its first chairperson.
  • The Protection of Human Rights Act received presidential assent on 8 January 1994, with retrospective effect from the date of the Ordinance.
• The Act is a single compact statute that does four things: it constitutes the NHRC, provides for State Human Rights Commissions, provides for Human Rights Courts at the district level, and defines the powers, procedure and finances of all three.

Statutory, not constitutional — and why that matters

• The NHRC is a statutory body. It has no article of the Constitution behind it, unlike the Election Commission (Article 324), the CAG (Article 148), the UPSC (Article 315) or the equality commissions under Articles 338, 338A and 338B.
• The consequences are concrete rather than symbolic.
  • Its existence, powers, composition and tenure can be altered by an ordinary majority in Parliament, as the 2006 and 2019 amendments showed.
  • Its recommendations carry no constitutional force, and it cannot claim the basic structure protection that shields constitutional offices from legislative encroachment.
• The counter-argument is real: a statutory body is easier to strengthen, since improving its powers needs a simple amendment rather than a two-thirds majority and state ratification. The difficulty is that in three decades the amending power has been used mainly to shorten tenure, not to add teeth.

Composition: who actually sits on the Commission

• The Commission has two classes of membership — full-time members appointed to it, and deemed members who sit by virtue of chairing another commission — and the difference between them explains much of how it works.

The full-time members

• Section 3 as it now stands provides for a chairperson and five full-time members.
  • A chairperson who has been Chief Justice of India or a Judge of the Supreme Court.
  • One member who is, or has been, a Judge of the Supreme Court.
  • One member who is, or has been, the Chief Justice of a High Court.
  • Three members appointed from among persons having knowledge of, or practical experience in, matters relating to human rights, of whom at least one shall be a woman.
• The arithmetic of that list is the most revealing fact about the design.
  • Three of six full-time positions are reserved for serving or retired senior judges, the chairperson necessarily among them.
  • The other three, open to human rights expertise rather than judicial seniority, have frequently gone to retired police officers, civil servants and diplomats, since the Act does not define practical experience.
  • The result is a body whose culture is judicial and bureaucratic, reasoning about violations in the register of individual cases and compensation rather than of systemic pattern and policy failure.

The deemed members

• The chairpersons of seven other national bodies are deemed to be members of the Commission for the purpose of discharging its functions under clauses (b) to (j) of Section 12 — that is, everything except the core function of inquiring into complaints.

Deemed member	Added by
Chairperson, National Commission for Minorities	1993 Act
Chairperson, National Commission for the Scheduled Castes	1993 Act (as the combined SC/ST commission; separated in 2006)
Chairperson, National Commission for the Scheduled Tribes	1993 Act, separated 2006
Chairperson, National Commission for Women	1993 Act
Chairperson, National Commission for Backward Classes	2019 amendment
Chairperson, National Commission for Protection of Child Rights	2019 amendment
Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities	2019 amendment

• The device was meant to make the NHRC the apex of a system rather than one commission among many, giving the specialised equality bodies a standing joint forum.
  • In practice these members attend irregularly, carry full workloads elsewhere, and are excluded from the complaint-inquiry function where the real work is done — the appearance of pluralism without its substance, which is precisely what international review has objected to.

The Secretary-General and the Director-General (Investigation)

• Section 11 provides for a Secretary-General who is the chief executive officer and exercises all administrative and financial powers, subject to the chairperson’s control and excluding judicial functions. The post is filled by a senior civil servant appointed by the central government, placing a government officer at the operational centre of the institution.
• Section 11 also provides for a Director-General (Investigation), a serving police officer, heading an investigation division staffed largely by police officers on deputation.
  • This is the arrangement by which police officers investigate allegations of police abuse — the most frequently cited structural conflict of interest in the design. It exists because the Act gave the Commission no power to recruit an investigative cadre of its own, a gap it has never been permitted to close.

What the 2019 amendment changed

• The change is commonly discussed under the name of the bill introduced in 2018; it was enacted as the Protection of Human Rights (Amendment) Act, 2019, passed by the Lok Sabha on 19 July and the Rajya Sabha on 22 July 2019.

Provision	Before 2019	After 2019
Chairperson, NHRC	Only a former Chief Justice of India	A former CJI or a Judge of the Supreme Court
Chairperson, SHRC	Only a former Chief Justice of a High Court	A former Chief Justice or Judge of a High Court
Human rights expert members	Two	Three, at least one a woman
Deemed members	Four	Seven (NCBC, NCPCR and the Chief Commissioner for Persons with Disabilities added)
Term	Five years or 70, one re-appointment	Three years or 70, re-appointment permitted without the earlier cap
Union Territories	No express provision	Centre may confer a UT’s human rights functions on a State Commission; Delhi is dealt with by the NHRC

• The widening of eligibility was defended on the ground that the pool of former Chief Justices of India is tiny, that the office had gone vacant for months waiting for a willing candidate, and that many Supreme Court judges have deeper human rights records than seniority-based rotation produces. The counter-argument is that a wider pool gives the appointing executive more discretion, which is the classic lever of capture.
• The reduction of tenure from five years to three matters most, and cuts directly against the Paris Principles.
  • A long, secure, non-renewable term insulates an office-holder from the government that appointed him; a short, renewable term makes his future depend on that government’s satisfaction. Renewability was retained and the earlier cap removed, so the incentive problem is sharper than “three years” suggests.
  • The official justification of harmonising with other commissions treats the NHRC as one commission among many rather than as an institution with a distinct international standard attached to its independence.
• The Union Territory provision filled a real gap, since UTs without a State Commission had no sub-national forum at all; assigning Delhi to the NHRC, however, loads the national body with a metropolitan caseload it was not designed to carry.

Appointment, tenure and removal: the independence architecture

The selection committee

• The chairperson and members are appointed by the President by warrant under his hand and seal, on the recommendation of a six-member committee: the Prime Minister as chairperson, the Speaker of the House of the People, the Minister in charge of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the Leaders of the Opposition in both Houses, and the Deputy Chairman of the Council of States.
• On paper this is a broad-based committee. In operation it is not, and the reason is arithmetic rather than bad faith.
  • Four of six members belong to the government side — the Prime Minister, the Home Minister, the Speaker and the Deputy Chairman, the last two being nominees of the ruling majority in their respective Houses.
  • The two Leaders of the Opposition are structurally outvoted, and the committee decides by majority rather than by consensus, so their participation supplies legitimacy without supplying influence.
  • Where the chairperson must also be a former Supreme Court judge, the judiciary has no representative on the committee at all — a contrast with the appointment architecture the Supreme Court itself designed for the Election Commission.
• The Act prescribes no advertisement of vacancies, no published criteria, no shortlisting process and no consultation with civil society. This absence, rather than any single appointment, is what international review has repeatedly objected to.

The appointment record and the 2024 dissent

• The convention has been to appoint a former Chief Justice of India as chairperson — from Justice Ranganath Misra through Justice M. N. Venkatachaliah, Justice J. S. Verma, Justice A. S. Anand, Justice K. G. Balakrishnan, Justice H. L. Dattu and Justice Arun Kumar Mishra — and to fill the expert seats substantially with former police officers and civil servants.
  • Justice V. Ramasubramanian, a former judge of the Supreme Court, assumed charge on 30 December 2024, the first appointment using the eligibility widened in 2019, alongside Justice Bidyut Ranjan Sarangi and Priyank Kanoongo, formerly chairperson of the NCPCR.
• That appointment produced a recorded dissent, which is unusual enough to be significant.
  • At the selection committee meeting of 18 December 2024 the opposition members, Mallikarjun Kharge and Rahul Gandhi, filed a written dissent calling the process “fundamentally flawed” and a “pre-determined exercise” that abandoned consultation and consensus in favour of a numerical majority, and argued that the Commission’s composition should reflect the regional, caste, community and religious diversity of the country.
  • They had proposed Justice Rohinton Fali Nariman or Justice Kurian Joseph for chairperson and Justice S. Muralidhar and Justice A. A. Qureshi as members.
• Whatever the merits of the rival names, the episode shows the design flaw exactly: a committee in which the government commands a permanent majority need persuade no one, and a dissent note is the only instrument the minority has.

Term, removal and the post-tenure bar

• The chairperson holds office for three years or until the age of seventy, whichever is earlier, and is eligible for re-appointment. A member holds office for three years and is likewise eligible; no member may hold office after attaining seventy.
• Resignation is by writing addressed to the President.
• Removal follows the model used for constitutional office-holders, and is the strongest independence guarantee the Act contains.
  • The chairperson or a member may be removed only by order of the President on the ground of proved misbehaviour or incapacity, and only after the Supreme Court, on a reference made to it by the President, has held an inquiry and reported that the ground is made out.
  • This means the executive cannot dismiss an inconvenient member; it must persuade the Supreme Court first.
• The President may, however, remove a member without any reference to the Supreme Court on four specified grounds, and these are the ordinary disqualifications rather than a discretionary power.
  • He is adjudged an insolvent.
  • He engages, during his term of office, in any paid employment outside the duties of his office.
  • He is of unsound mind and stands so declared by a competent court, or is unfit to continue by reason of infirmity of mind or body.
  • He is convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for an offence which in the opinion of the President involves moral turpitude.
• On ceasing to hold office, a chairperson or member is ineligible for further employment under the Government of India or under the government of any State — the counterpart of the removal protection: security while in office and no reward after it. It is materially weakened by the renewable three-year term, since re-appointment to the same office falls outside the bar.

The functions the Act confers

• Section 12 lists the Commission’s functions in ten clauses, and the list is genuinely broad — the mandate is not where the design fails.

Clause	Function
(a)	Inquire, suo motu or on a petition, into a violation of human rights or negligence in the prevention of such violation by a public servant
(b)	Intervene in any proceeding involving an allegation of violation of human rights pending before a court, with the approval of that court
(c)	Visit any jail or other institution under the control of a state government where persons are detained or lodged for treatment, reformation or protection, study the living conditions of inmates and make recommendations
(d) and (e)	Review the safeguards provided by or under the Constitution or any law, and review the factors, including acts of terrorism, that inhibit the enjoyment of rights, recommending remedial measures
(f) and (g)	Study treaties and other international instruments and recommend measures for their implementation; undertake and promote research
(h) to (j)	Spread human rights literacy, encourage the efforts of non-governmental organisations, and such other functions as it considers necessary

• Those ten clauses reduce to four kinds of activity.
  • Custodial oversight — regular inspection of prisons, police lock-ups, mental hospitals, juvenile and shelter homes and detention centres, where state power over the individual is most complete and least visible.
  • Legislative and policy advice — an opinion on proposed legislation and its human rights implications, and on the safeguards already in place.
  • Human rights education — training for police and prison staff, curriculum work with universities and schools, publications and awareness campaigns.
  • Inquiry — reviewing complaints and taking suo motu cognisance of incidents, the function that generates almost all of the Commission’s public visibility.
• The suo motu power deserves emphasis because it is what distinguishes the Commission from a grievance-redress counter.
  • It need not wait for a victim to complain, which matters most where victims are least able to — custodial deaths, deaths of the destitute, atrocities in remote districts, deaths in state institutions.
  • It took suo motu cognisance in 109 cases in the year to November 2024 and 106 in 2023-24, which against a caseload near seventy thousand is a very selective use of the most discretionary power it has.
• The intervention power under clause (b) is its route into constitutional litigation, and has been used sparingly: intervening commits the Commission to a public position against a government it depends on.

Powers of inquiry, and what happens after an inquiry

Civil court powers

• Section 13 gives the Commission, while inquiring into complaints, all the powers of a civil court trying a suit under the Code of Civil Procedure.
  • Summoning and enforcing the attendance of witnesses and examining them on oath; discovery and production of any document; receiving evidence on affidavits; requisitioning any public record; and issuing commissions to examine witnesses or documents.
  • It may also require any person to furnish information on any subject within its inquiry, and enter any building or place where relevant documents may be found and take extracts from them.
• Crucially, every proceeding before the Commission is deemed to be a judicial proceeding within the meaning of Sections 193 and 228 of the Indian Penal Code, and the Commission is deemed a civil court for the purposes of Section 195 and Chapter XXVI of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
  • Giving false evidence before it is therefore perjury, and refusing to attend is contempt of a civil court.
  • This is the strongest argument for treating its findings as quasi-judicial: a body whose proceedings the law deems judicial and whose evidence-gathering the law equips as a court’s produces findings of a different order from a departmental note.

Investigation

• Section 14 allows the Commission to utilise the services of any officer or investigation agency of the central or a state government, with that government’s concurrence, for the purpose of conducting an investigation.
  • The officer so deployed works under the Commission’s direction for the inquiry, and the Commission may examine and act on his report.
  • But the Commission cannot compel a government to spare an officer, cannot choose freely from outside the police service, and cannot build a permanent investigative staff of its own.
• This is the deepest operational weakness in the statute. The body that investigates the police is staffed by the police, and its access to facts about a state depends on that state’s cooperation.

After the inquiry: Section 18

• Section 18, as recast by the 2006 amendment, sets out what the Commission may do once an inquiry establishes a violation. Its powers are recommendatory in form but wider than is usually acknowledged.
  • Recommend payment of compensation or damages to the victim or next of kin, and the initiation of proceedings for prosecution or other action against the public servant concerned.
  • Recommend the grant of immediate interim relief, approach the Supreme Court or the High Court for such directions, orders or writs as it may deem necessary, and provide a copy of the inquiry report to the petitioner.
• Two duties fall on the government in return, and both are routinely treated as optional.
  • The concerned government shall, within a period of one month — or such further time as the Commission allows — forward its comments on the report, including the action taken or proposed to be taken.
  • The Commission shall publish its inquiry report together with those comments and the action taken, which is its principal sanction: publicity.
• The power to move the Supreme Court or a High Court under Section 18 is the least-used and most interesting of these. It converts the Commission from a recommender into a litigant with the state’s own evidence in hand, and a serious reform agenda would begin by asking why it is invoked so rarely.

Reporting to Parliament

• Section 20 requires an annual report to the central and state governments, permits special reports on urgent matters, and requires both to be laid before each House of Parliament — or the state legislature — together with a memorandum of action taken and the reasons for non-acceptance of any recommendation.
  • Requiring reasons for rejection is a genuine accountability device: a government must state on the record why it declines to act on a finding of rights violation.
  • Its value depends on timely tabling, and the record is poor. Reports reach Parliament long after the year they cover — the 2023-24 report was the latest published in mid-2026 — by which time the memorandum is an archival document rather than an occasion for scrutiny.

The Commission’s powers of inquiry are substantial and its powers of enforcement are not, and that asymmetry is a design choice rather than an accident.

Section 19: the armed forces exclusion

• Section 19 removes from the Commission’s ordinary procedure every complaint against a member of the armed forces, and substitutes a procedure that is not investigation at all.
  • The Commission may seek a report from the central government, either on its own motion or on a petition.
  • After receiving the report it may either not proceed with the complaint, or make recommendations to that government. There is no third option.
  • The central government shall inform the Commission of the action taken within three months, or such further time as the Commission allows.
  • The Commission shall publish its report together with its recommendations and the action taken, and give a copy to the petitioner.
• What is missing is the entire investigative apparatus of Sections 13, 14 and 17.
  • The Commission cannot summon a witness, visit the site, depute an investigating officer or require production of a document, and cannot test the government’s account against any independently gathered fact.
  • It is confined to reading what the accused institution writes about itself — a post box for exactly the class of complaint where independent scrutiny matters most.
• The definition matters as much as the procedure. Section 2(1)(a) defines “armed forces” as the naval, military and air forces and any other armed forces of the Union, which has been read to bring the central armed police forces — the CRPF, BSF, ITBP, CISF, SSB and Assam Rifles — within the exclusion.
  • These are the forces deployed on internal security duty in Jammu and Kashmir, the North-East and the Left-wing extremism belt, so a provision defended as protecting military operational secrecy shields the very forces whose work is domestic policing under another name.

AFSPA and the impunity architecture

• Section 19 sits on top of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958, the primary legal architecture of impunity in the disturbed areas.
  • Section 4 authorises any commissioned or non-commissioned officer to fire upon or otherwise use force, even to the causing of death, against a person contravening a prohibitory order, and to arrest and search without warrant.
  • Section 6 bars prosecution or other legal proceeding against anyone acting under the Act except with the previous sanction of the central government, a sanction refused or left undecided in the overwhelming majority of cases.
• Two official inquiries examined the statute and both concluded it could not stand as it was.
  • The Committee to Review the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, chaired by Justice B. P. Jeevan Reddy and appointed after the Manipur protests of 2004, reported in 2005 that the Act had become “a symbol of oppression, an object of hate and an instrument of discrimination and highhandedness”.
  • It recommended that the Act be repealed, with the necessary powers relocated to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act under tighter safeguards. The report was never acted upon.
  • The Santosh Hegde Commission, appointed by the Supreme Court to examine six encounter deaths in Manipur, reported in 2013 that all six killings were unlawful and that the victims had no criminal antecedents of the kind alleged.
• The judicial answer came in Extra Judicial Execution Victim Families Association v. Union of India (2016), on a petition alleging 1,528 extra-judicial killings in Manipur.
  • The Supreme Court held that there is no absolute immunity for members of the armed forces, and that every death caused by them in a disturbed area must be thoroughly inquired into where abuse or misuse of power is alleged.
  • Excessive or retaliatory force is impermissible even against an insurgent or an armed person, and a democracy, the Court observed, is in grave danger if forces deployed to protect citizens may kill them on suspicion.
  • The reasoning bears directly on Section 19: if such deaths must be independently inquired into, an exclusion that stops the national human rights institution from inquiring is difficult to justify.

The argument on both sides

The case for retaining Section 19	The case for repealing it
Operational secrecy — disclosure of deployment, sources and methods could compromise missions and endanger personnel	Proceedings can be held in camera; secrecy is a reason for confidentiality, not immunity from inquiry
A separate internal disciplinary system under the Army Act already exists, and duplication invites conflicting findings	That system is not independent, conviction rates in civilian deaths are negligible, and Section 6 of AFSPA blocks the civilian route
Morale requires protection from frivolous or motivated complaints	The remedy for bad complaints is screening, not blanket exclusion
Civilian bodies lack the technical competence to judge split-second decisions under fire	Expert assessors can supply competence; the alternative is no independent assessment at all
The Commission can still seek a report and publish recommendations	A report written by the accused is not evidence, and EEVFAM requires thorough independent inquiry

• The reform position that commands the widest support is narrowing rather than abolishing the provision: restrict the definition of “armed forces” to the army, navy and air force alone, taking the central armed police forces out of it, and permit the Commission to investigate independently even in those cases, with procedural safeguards for genuinely operational material.

Section 36(2): the one-year limitation

• Section 36(2) bars the Commission from inquiring into any matter after the expiry of one year from the date on which the act constituting the violation is alleged to have been committed. The bar is absolute; there is no power to condone delay for good cause.
• The objection is sociological rather than technical.
  • The violations slowest to surface are those committed by powerful state agencies against the least powerful people — where the victim faces continuing threat, is in custody, displaced, illiterate, or dependent on the local police. Groups facing an immediate threat to life rarely report within twelve months, and the provision converts their silence into a permanent bar.
  • Patterned violations — a series of disappearances, a policy of demolitions, deaths in an institution over years — become visible as patterns only after the individual events are time-barred.
• Section 36(1) adds a further bar: the Commission may not inquire into a matter pending before a State Commission or any other commission duly constituted under any law, which is the statutory root of the overlapping-jurisdiction problem.
• The limitation is not wholly rigid. In Paramjit Kaur v. State of Punjab the Supreme Court, acting under Article 32, referred the Punjab mass cremations to the Commission and held that on such a reference it functions as a sui generis body — an agency of the Court — not confined by Section 36(2).
  • The doctrine is narrow: it frees the Commission only where the Supreme Court has sent it the matter, not where a victim approaches directly, so every reform proposal since has sought the section’s deletion or a power to condone delay.

The record: where the Commission has actually mattered

• Assessing the Commission means separating what it has achieved as a norm-setter and documenter from what it has achieved as an enforcer. The first record is respectable; the second is thin.

Chakma refugees, 1998

• The Chakmas, displaced from the Chittagong Hill Tracts and settled in what is now Arunachal Pradesh since the 1960s, faced organised pressure from local student organisations, including an economic blockade and threatened eviction.
• The Commission recommended in 1998 against their deportation, holding that expulsion into danger would violate their right to life, and the state abandoned deportation.
  • The intervention ran parallel to the Supreme Court’s holding in NHRC v. State of Arunachal Pradesh (1996) that Article 21 protects every person, citizen or not, and that the state was bound to protect the Chakmas’ life and liberty.
  • It is the clearest demonstration that a body without enforcement power can still change an outcome, by combining a public finding with access to the constitutional courts.

TADA and POTA

• The Commission argued against the extraordinary police powers conferred by the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act and later the Prevention of Terrorism Act — confessions to police officers made admissible, prolonged detention without charge, and reversed burdens of proof.
  • Its opposition to POTA, in a formal opinion to Parliament, is the best example of the Section 12(d) and 12(e) advisory functions being used against the government of the day rather than for it, and it fed the criticism that ended both statutes: TADA lapsed in 1995 and POTA was repealed in 2004.
• The formulation sometimes encountered — that the Supreme Court struck these laws down as unconstitutional — is inaccurate. The Court upheld both statutes on challenge, in Kartar Singh and in PUCL v. Union of India, while narrowing their operation; it was the political process, informed by the Commission’s opposition, that ended them.

The Punjab mass cremations

• The most important reference ever made to the Commission is also the most instructive about its limits.
  • After the disappearance of the activist Jaswant Singh Khalra, who had documented secret cremations of unidentified bodies by the Punjab police, the Supreme Court in 1996 directed a CBI inquiry and referred the question of accountability to the Commission. The CBI confirmed 2,097 bodies cremated in Amritsar district — 582 identified, 279 partially identified and 1,239 unidentified.
• The Commission took nine years and recommended monetary relief of roughly Rs 28 crore for the families of 1,513 victims.
  • It expressly declined to express any opinion on the culpability of any police officer or official, called neither family members nor officials to testify, and framed the case as a failure of procedure in the disposal of bodies rather than a systemic violation of the right to life.
• The episode is the clearest available statement of the design-versus-practice gap: freed by the Supreme Court from its statutory limitation, given the state’s own investigative agency, and handed the most serious set of allegations in its history, the Commission produced compensation without accountability.

The 2002 Gujarat riots

• The Commission conducted an on-the-spot inquiry and reported a failure of the state to protect life and property and a pattern of fear and intimidation that would deny riot victims a fair trial within the state.
  • It recommended the transfer of key cases out of Gujarat and their investigation by the CBI, and moved the Supreme Court under Section 18 — a rare exercise of that power. The Court subsequently ordered the retrial of the Best Bakery case outside Gujarat and constituted a Special Investigation Team.
• This is the strongest instance of the Commission acting against a state government in real time, and its instrument was not its own order but the Supreme Court’s.

Custodial deaths and the twenty-four-hour rule

• In December 1993, within weeks of its constitution, the Commission directed every District Magistrate and Superintendent of Police to report any custodial death or custodial rape to it within twenty-four hours of occurrence, warning that failure to report promptly would raise a presumption of attempted suppression.
  • It later extended the requirement to judicial as well as police custody, required videography of post-mortem examinations, and prescribed a Model Autopsy Form and inquest procedure to prevent manipulation of medical evidence.
• This is the Commission’s most durable achievement, and it is an achievement of information architecture rather than enforcement: before 1993 there was no national dataset on deaths in custody at all, and the category exists as a public fact because the Commission created the reporting obligation. What follows a report is another matter — relief in a minority of cases, prosecutions almost never.

Encounter killings and the guidelines

• The Commission issued guidelines on deaths in police encounters in 1997, revised in 2003 and again in 2010.
  • Prompt intimation to the Commission — within forty-eight hours under the revised guidelines — with a follow-up report in three months.
  • Investigation by an independent agency such as the state CID wherever officers of the same police station are involved, and registration of an FIR where culpable homicide is alleged.
  • A magisterial inquiry in every case, with the next of kin entitled to participate, and no out-of-turn promotion or instant gallantry award soon after the incident.
• The Supreme Court converted this approach into binding law in People’s Union for Civil Liberties v. State of Maharashtra (2014), laying down sixteen guidelines.
  • A mandatory FIR, independent investigation by another police station or the CID under a senior officer, and a magisterial inquiry under Section 176 of the Code of Criminal Procedure.
  • Immediate intimation to the NHRC or the State Commission, prompt forwarding of post-mortem and forensic material, no out-of-turn promotions or gallantry awards until the death is shown to be genuine, and compensation to dependants.
  • Together the guidelines and the directions form a complete procedural code on paper.
  • Compliance is another matter: the Commission recorded in 2010 that most states were not following its recommendations in the true spirit, and over the six years to 2021-22 more than 800 encounter cases produced no prosecutions or convictions and about Rs 7 crore in recommended compensation.

The Commission’s output in numbers

• The scale of the work is large; the figures matter alongside what happens after disposal.
  • Since inception the Commission has registered about 23.15 lakh cases, disposed of about 23.08 lakh, and recommended monetary relief of about Rs 256.57 crore. In the year to November 2024 it registered 65,973 cases, disposed of 66,378 and recommended Rs 17.24 crore.
  • In 2023-24 it registered 76,891 complaints, disposed of 73,958, recommended compensation of about Rs 18.9 crore in 414 cases, conducted 30 spot inquiries, and worked on a budget of about Rs 67 crore with 282 of 356 sanctioned posts filled.
• Three features of that record are more revealing than the totals.
  • Disposal is not remedy. Compensation was recommended in 414 of nearly 74,000 disposals in 2023-24 — well under one per cent. Most complaints are dismissed in limine, closed on the government’s own report, or transferred.
  • Complaint volume has fallen sharply, from about 1.17 lakh in 2015-16 to the seventy-thousand range, a decline of roughly forty per cent more consistent with falling awareness and confidence than with improving conditions.
  • Classification is poor: roughly ninety per cent of registered cases sit under the residual head “others”, so the Commission’s own data cannot say which violations dominate its docket.
• On custodial and encounter deaths, the figures the Commission receives are steadier than its remedies.
  • Deaths in police custody intimated to it ran at 176 in 2021-22, 163 in 2022-23, 157 in 2023-24 and 140 in 2024-25, with 170 reported for 2025-26 up to March 2026 — figures placed before Parliament in March 2026.
  • Deaths in judicial custody run an order of magnitude higher, in the region of 2,500 a year, reflecting prison overcrowding, undertrial populations and denial of medical care.
  • Across those five years, government data recorded a single disciplinary action against personnel in custodial death cases nationally, and prosecutions of police for human rights violations have produced no convictions in recent years.

A body that registers seventy thousand complaints a year and recommends relief in four hundred of them is measuring its workload rather than its impact.

The human rights landscape the Commission works in

• The Commission’s performance is only intelligible against the scale and character of violations in India, which fall under five recurring heads.

Women and children

• Reported violence against women is voluminous and heavily domestic: of about 3.38 lakh crimes against women registered in 2016, roughly 1.1 lakh were cruelty by the husband or his relatives, and annual totals have since passed four lakh.
• The most conspicuous legal gap is the non-criminalisation of marital rape. Exception 2 to Section 63 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, carried over unchanged from the Indian Penal Code, provides that sexual acts by a man with his own wife, she not being under eighteen, are not rape.
  • The Justice J. S. Verma Committee, constituted after the December 2012 Delhi gang rape and reporting in January 2013, recommended that the marital rape exception be removed and that marriage not be a defence or a mitigating factor.
  • Parliament declined it in 2013 and again when recodifying criminal law in 2023. The Delhi High Court delivered a split verdict in 2022 and the challenge remains pending in the Supreme Court, with the Union government opposing removal as excessively harsh on the institution of marriage.
• Violence against children was recorded in about 1.06 lakh cases in 2016 and has climbed steeply since, with offences under the POCSO Act the fastest-growing category.
  • The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2016 raised the minimum age for employment from 14 to 18 years for hazardous occupations, but created a loophole for family and domestic enterprises, permitting a child to help in a family business after school hours — which legalises much of the home-based and agricultural child labour it was meant to end.

Police torture and the treatment of prisoners

• Deaths in custody, third-degree methods in interrogation, overcrowded prisons, an undertrial majority in the prison population and denial of medical care are the standing findings of the Commission’s own custodial jurisdiction.
• India signed the United Nations Convention against Torture in 1997 and has never ratified it, and consequently has no law criminalising torture as a distinct offence.
  • The Law Commission’s 273rd Report (2017) recommended ratification and a Prevention of Torture Bill with a statutory definition, a reversed burden of proof where injury occurs in custody, and compensation; nothing was enacted.
  • Without a defined offence, custodial torture is prosecuted, if at all, as ordinary hurt or culpable homicide — a principal reason for the near-total absence of convictions.

Extra-judicial killings

• Allegations of fake encounters recur across Punjab, Manipur, Jammu and Kashmir, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Assam and Telangana, and the pattern is constant: a claimed exchange of fire, an internal inquiry, no independent investigation, and public approval of “instant justice”.
  • That the law is settled while the practice is unchanged is itself the finding: PUCL (2014) and EEVFAM (2016) require independent investigation of every such death, and convictions remain effectively nil.

The rights of indigenous communities

• State policy and policing have repeatedly worked against Adivasi and forest-dwelling communities — through land acquisition, mining leases, forest clearances and counter-insurgency in the Left-wing extremism districts.
• The standing example is displacement by large dams: Medha Patkar and the Narmada Bachao Andolan argued that the completion of the Sardar Sarovar dam in 2017 left about 40,000 displaced families, largely tribal, without full compensation or the land-for-land rehabilitation policy promised.
  • The rights at stake are those the Forest Rights Act, 2006 and the consent and rehabilitation provisions of the 2013 land acquisition law were meant to secure; the gap is one of implementation, not of statutory text.

Refugees

• A refugee flees an immediate threat to life or liberty in the state of nationality and seeks shelter elsewhere. India’s practice has been comparatively open: it has hosted Tibetans since 1959, Chakmas, and refugees from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Pakistan.
• India has never signed the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol and has no domestic refugee law, so protection is executive and discretionary, administered under the Foreigners Act, 1946, which does not distinguish a refugee from an illegal migrant.
  • Generosity toward one group therefore coexists with exclusion of another: reports in 2017 and 2018 of the Home Ministry’s intention to deport some 40,000 Rohingya on security grounds sit alongside decades of hospitality to Tibetans.
  • Both arguments are real — no statute preserves diplomatic flexibility and avoids a pull factor; a statute would supply non-refoulement, a determination procedure and equal treatment across nationalities.

The critique

• The sharpest criticisms of the Commission have come from within the Indian legal establishment rather than from outside it.

“The biggest post office in India.” — Justice V. R. Krishna Iyer, on the National Human Rights Commission

• The metaphor is exact rather than merely rude: the Commission receives a complaint, forwards it to the government complained against, receives that government’s reply, and forwards the reply to the complainant. Transmission substitutes for adjudication.

“It has assumed a stance far too grandiose not commensurate with its resources and internal will… a mere showpiece to convince the world that the government is committed to human rights protection.” — Rajeev Dhavan

• Dhavan’s charge joins two distinct failures — insufficient resources and insufficient will — and insists that the second cannot be excused by the first.
• The recurring structural objections can be set out compactly.

Weakness	What it consists of
Recommendatory powers	It cannot penalise any authority for disregarding a finding; its only sanction is publication
Administrative and financial dependence	Its budget and establishment run through the Ministry of Home Affairs, the nodal ministry for the Act, so the body it scrutinises controls its means
The one-year limitation	Section 36(2) closes the door on delayed and patterned violations
Overlapping jurisdiction	Section 36(1) and the proliferation of commissions leave a victim unsure which forum to approach and each forum able to point elsewhere
Lack of reach	It has not effectively reached all parts of the country; Jammu and Kashmir, outside the Act’s application for its first twenty-six years, is the standing example
Shortcomings in investigation	No machinery of its own; requests go to the central or state government to depute an officer, and the government chooses whom to spare
A ceremonial platform	Treated as a post-retirement destination for judges, police officers and bureaucrats, which shapes who applies and how the body reasons
Inadequate funds and vacancies	About Rs 67 crore and roughly a fifth of sanctioned posts unfilled, for a national mandate
Composition	Excess representation of judges and a shortage of human rights and civil liberties experts, with functioning that is bureaucratic rather than investigative

• Two former holders of high constitutional office supplied the phrases that have stuck. Justice H. L. Dattu, while serving as its chairperson, called the Commission a “toothless tiger”; Soli Sorabjee, a former Attorney General, called it a “teasing illusion” — a body that appears to promise a remedy and does not deliver one.

The federal layer: State Commissions and Human Rights Courts

• Section 21 empowers a state government to constitute a State Human Rights Commission with a chairperson who has been a Chief Justice or Judge of a High Court and two members, to inquire into violations of rights in the State List and Concurrent List.
• The system as built is uneven. Roughly twenty-five states have constituted commissions; several states and most Union Territories have none.
  • Vacancies are chronic: audits have found close to half of all sanctioned positions vacant across the State Commissions taken together, several functioning under acting chairpersons and some with no members at all.
  • Investigative staff is thinner still — several commissions hold between one and five investigators and a few hold none, so the state police investigate complaints against the state police here too.
• The relationship with the NHRC is one of exclusion rather than hierarchy. Section 36(1) prevents the NHRC from inquiring into a matter pending before a State Commission, but the NHRC has no power of supervision, no appellate jurisdiction and no power to call for records — so a weak State Commission blocks the strong forum without substituting for it.
• Section 30 provides that a state government may, with the concurrence of the Chief Justice of the High Court, specify for each district a Court of Session to be a Human Rights Court for the speedy trial of offences arising out of violations of human rights, with a Special Public Prosecutor under Section 31.
  • This layer has largely never been built. Where courts are notified they function as ordinary sessions courts with an added label, because the Act never defines which offences count as arising out of a human rights violation, and a Sessions Court cannot take cognisance directly.
  • In Dilip K. Basu v. State of West Bengal (2015) the Supreme Court criticised state governments’ laxity and read the permissive language of Section 30 as obligatory, with limited effect on the ground.

The GANHRI accreditation review

• GANHRI accredits national human rights institutions against the Paris Principles through its Sub-Committee on Accreditation. ‘A’ status means full compliance; ‘B’ status means partial compliance.
• India’s sequence is a slow slide rather than a single shock.
  • Accreditation deferred in 2016, then ‘A’ status confirmed in 2017.
  • Review deferred again in 2023 and in 2024.
  • At its forty-fifth session in March 2025 the Sub-Committee recommended that the NHRC be downgraded from ‘A’ to ‘B’ status — the first such recommendation in the institution’s history.
  • Under Article 18.1 of the GANHRI Statute a downgrade recommendation does not take effect for a year, during which the institution may show continued compliance. India was not taken up at the forty-seventh session, and GANHRI’s own membership list still records the NHRC as an ‘A’ status institution.
  • The recommendation therefore hangs over the Commission as an unresolved finding rather than a settled demotion — which is its own kind of verdict, since the deficiencies it identified have not been answered.
• The grounds are a direct application of the six accreditation criteria to the design features described above.
  • Political interference and lack of independence, including the government’s role in appointing the Secretary-General.
  • An opaque appointment process with no advertisement of vacancies, no published criteria and no broad consultation.
  • Insufficient pluralism — one woman among six commissioners, and a staff composition heavily skewed by gender, with inadequate representation of ethnic and religious minorities.
  • Investigation of police abuses by police officers on deputation, the conflict of interest built into Section 11 and Section 14.
  • Weak and selective engagement with civil society, particularly with organisations working on contentious subjects.
  • Inadequate response to systemic violations — shrinking civic space, action against human rights defenders and journalists, custodial deaths, and the absence of any on-the-ground inquiry in Manipur after May 2023 until the Supreme Court intervened.
  • A remedial practice confined to recommending compensation rather than prosecution or disciplinary action.
• What a downgrade would cost is not merely reputational. A ‘B’ status institution loses the right to vote in GANHRI and to hold office in its governance, and loses the right to speak and to submit documents in its own name in Human Rights Council proceedings and before the treaty bodies, retaining only observer presence.
  • India’s national institution would be silenced in exactly the forums where the government most wants a domestic voice defending the domestic record.
  • Even unexecuted, the recommendation does the damage that matters most: it converts a contested political claim about the Commission’s independence into a finding by its own professional peers, arrived at by applying a standard India helped write.

The Commission measured against the Paris Principles

Criterion	The NHRC’s position
Broad mandate	Satisfied. A wide statutory definition of rights and a ten-clause function list
Autonomy from government	Not satisfied. Budget and establishment routed through the executive; a government-appointed Secretary-General as chief executive
Independence guaranteed by law	Partly satisfied. Strong removal protection, undercut by a short renewable term and executive-dominated appointment
Pluralism	Not satisfied. Judicial and bureaucratic dominance; deemed members excluded from the inquiry function
Adequate resources	Not satisfied. A modest budget, persistent vacancies, no independent recruitment
Adequate powers of investigation	Not satisfied. No investigative cadre of its own; Section 19 and Section 36(2) remove the gravest and the oldest complaints from reach

The reform agenda

• The reform proposals are unusually settled; what is absent is not diagnosis but political will.
• Make the findings binding, or at least quasi-judicial. The Commission holds the powers of a civil court and its proceedings are deemed judicial proceedings, which is a strong argument that its findings should bind the state rather than advise it. The intermediate proposal is a mandatory action-taken report within a year, laid before the legislature — Section 18’s one-month duty made visible.
• Empower it to grant relief rather than recommend it, including interim and immediate monetary relief, and to penalise those it finds responsible, so that a finding carries deterrent consequence.
• Build an independent investigative cadre, recruited by the Commission from forensic, medical and civil society backgrounds, instead of police officers on deputation whose careers remain with the institutions under inquiry.
• Restrict the armed forces exclusion to the army, navy and air force, removing the central armed police forces, and permit independent investigation even in those cases.
• Delete the one-year limitation, or vest the chairperson with power to condone delay for reasons recorded in writing.
• Reform appointment and composition. Advertise vacancies, publish criteria, require consultation, and open membership to civil society representatives and human rights activists, with statutory floors for women and for regional, caste and religious diversity.
• Guarantee financial autonomy through a charged or block grant and power to fix its own establishment, so the body scrutinising the executive is not administratively dependent on it.
• Amend or repeal the laws whose misuse generates violations — preventive detention statutes, the successor to sedition, the UAPA’s bail architecture and AFSPA — since much custodial and encounter violence rests on immunity the law itself supplies.
• Constitutional status is the maximal demand: an article of the Constitution would place composition, tenure and independence beyond an ordinary majority.

Should the equality commissions be merged into the NHRC?

• The Second Administrative Reforms Commission proposed consolidating the commissions for disadvantaged groups into a single umbrella human rights body, and the proposal is live because overlapping jurisdiction is a real cost to complainants.

For merger	Against merger
Ends forum confusion and the ability of each body to point to another	The NCSC, NCST and NCBC are constitutional bodies under Articles 338, 338A and 338B; merging them would require a constitutional amendment and would demote them
Pools scarce investigative and legal capacity into one competent institution	Group-specific commissions carry specialised expertise and constituency legitimacy that a general body would dilute
Produces a single, louder national voice on rights	Concentrates every rights function in one body the executive appoints, magnifying the risk of capture
Matches the international model, where most NHRIs handle discrimination within a general mandate	Caste, tribe and gender are distinct constitutional projects with their own remedial architecture, not sub-heads of a general rights mandate

• The workable middle position is coordination without merger: a statutory duty on the specialised commissions to share findings with the NHRC, a single-window intake that routes a complaint to the right forum, and a clear rule of priority replacing the mutual exclusion created by Section 36(1).

Conclusion: design and practice

The Commission has been a competent documenter and a serious norm-setter: the custodial death reporting rule, the encounter guidelines, the Chakma intervention, the opposition to POTA and the Gujarat transfers are achievements no other Indian institution produced. It has not been an enforcer, and it was never equipped to be one. A body whose investigators are policemen, whose tenure is short and renewable, whose committee the executive controls, and whose gravest complaints are excluded by statute will produce compensation without accountability, as it did in Punjab. The 2025 downgrade recommendation certified an old design.

The gap between the Commission’s mandate and its capacity is not a gap in performance but a gap written into the statute, and only the statute can close it.