The two commissions have only
six more months to work but they have just got down the business to find truth
and facts over the various conflict cases.
Confusion prevails as the existing
laws do not recognize ‘enforced disappearance’ or ‘torture’ as crime.
Moreover, the Supreme Court had instructed
the government to amend the Act related
to the commissions.
Chairmen of both the commissions
had urged the Legislature-Parliament’s Human Rights and Social Justice
Committee to pass the amended Act and laws on torture.
“Article 25 (1) of Act on
Commission on Investigation of Disappeared Persons and Truth and
Reconciliation, 2014, has enabled us to recommend the government to punish the
perpetrators. But, we don’t have legal provisions to recommend special
punishment in peculiar cases. We can’t specify the nature of punishment in the
absence of proper legal framework,” said Prof. Dr. Bishnu Pathak, spokesperson
of CIEDP.
The bill has been stuck at the
Ministry of Peace and Reconstruction (MoPR) for the last four months, and it
hasn’t forwarded it to the Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs (MoLJPA)
even after multiple follow ups from the latter.
“We have not received the draft
of the bills yet. The Minister in the previous government himself had asked the
MoPR to send the draft at the earliest,” informed Hum Bahadur KC, deputy
spokesperson of the MoLJPA.
The bill has proposed a jail
term from three months to 15 years and a fine of Rs 30,000 to Rs 500,000 to the
culprits depending on the nature of their crime.
The bill to declare the tortures
as criminal offence has been pending in the parliament-secretariat for the last
two years.
The TRC has received a total of
53,151complaints and the CIEDP 2,793 complaints.
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