KATHMANDU, Jan 30: The government has finalized the Ordinance for a Disappearance Commission despite mounting national and international criticism against forming the body in haste and without parliament´s oversight.
Senior government officials involved in preparing the ordinance said that it is now ready for promulgation by President Dr Ram Baran Yadav. Bureaucrats had worked even on Thursday, a public holiday, to give final touches to the ordinance.
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The ordinance has proposed a five-member commission to probe the whereabouts of people disappeared by government forces and the Maoists during the 10-year-long armed Maoist conflict. [break] The ordinance has been readied following a cabinet go-ahead on Wednesday. The cabinet on Wednesday decided in “principle” to promulgate the ordinance.
The ordinance says that a former Supreme Court judge or a person eligible to be an apex court judge will lead the commission. It further says that a distinguish jurist, a human rights activist, a woman representative and a sociologist or psychologist will be members of the proposed and much-talked-about commission.
“The commission will recommend compensation to the victims’ families besides probing the whereabouts of the disappeared within six months,” a senior government official involved in drafting the ordinance told myrepublica.com on Friday.
According to the ordinance, the National Human Rights Commission, the constitutional human rights watchdog, will monitor implementation of the report submitted by the disappearance commission and the recommendations made by it.
This is yet another bid on the part of the government to establish a commission on enforced disappearances after the Supreme Court ordered it on June 1, 2007 to establish an all-powerful commission to find out the status of missing people.
However, the government’s successive efforts to set up such a commission had failed in the past following vehement protests by the national and international human rights community. They had accused the government of trying to establish such a commission without meeting international standards.
In another apparent bid on June 26, 2007, the government had even named a three-member disappearance commission led by former Supreme Court justice Narendra Bahadur Neupane. But the commission did not even start its work because of vehement objections from the national and international human rights community over the obvious affiliation of members of the commission – advocates Sher Bahadur KC and Raman Kumar Shrestha -- to political parties.
Now also, the government´s decision to introduce a commission through ordinance has drawn criticism from human rights activists.
“There should be much deliberation inside parliament and outside it before introducing a law related to such a commission,” said human rights activist Subodh Pyakurel, who is also chairperson of the Informal Sector Service Center, a human rights NGO.
Officials involved in drafting the ordinance further said that the government preferred to introduce the law on the disappearance commission through ordinance as it feared that it would take months to get it enacted if presented in parliament. Parliament was adjourned two weeks ago.
According to the United Nations Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances (WGEID), in 2003 and 2004 Nepal recorded the highest number of new disappearance cases in the world. There is no exact figure for the people disappeared during the armed conflict. However, the National Human Rights Commission has put the figure at over 1,000.
kiran@myrepublica.com
