Why should India’s human rights record matter in its bid for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council?

It’s important to review India’s pattern of engagement with the human rights architecture as a whole, including with  the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and UN human rights treaty bodies.

Such analysis, as presented below, indicates that India has not been a strong leader at the UNHRC, willing to take difficult and principled stands with consistent application of human rights values; nor has it engaged particularly constructively with Council mechanisms. There is much room for improvement on India’s engagement with the human rights system in relation to its own domestic human rights challenges.

What is the UN Security Council?

The UNSC is – theoretically – the most powerful political UN body, with a mandate to maintain international peace and security. It has 15 members: five permanent and 10 elected. The five permanent members are China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. The non-permanent members are elected for a term of two years. The Security Council can establish peacekeeping operations, impose sanctions or arms embargoes, instruct human rights investigations, authorize the use of force, create international criminal tribunals and refer cases to the International Criminal Court.

What is India’s record with other human rights mechanisms, and why does it matter?

So far, India has been a non-permanent member of the UNSC eight times, its last term being in 2021-2022. It has now bid for the 2028-2029 term.

Besides equitable geographical distribution, the UN Charter underlines the contribution of the candidate to the maintenance of international peace and security as an important consideration for membership. In 2021, the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet said “although it is the primary responsibility of the Human Rights Council, promoting and protecting human rights is one of the best ways for the Security Council to achieve its mandate of maintaining international peace and security.”

Bearing that in mind, it is crucial to take a quick look at India’s engagement with the UN human rights system in the past few years.

India and the UN Human Rights Council and its mechanisms

India has been a member of the UNHRC for 16 of the Council’s 18 years – most recently from 2019 to 2024.Resolution 60/251 that created the UNHRC states that “members elected to the Council shall uphold the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights, shall fully cooperate with the Council, and be reviewed under the universal periodic review mechanism during their term of membership”.

Whether India has fulfilled these criteria is debatable. It has been the subject of around 25 statements from UN human rights experts and OHCHR since 2019 – during its last two terms of membership – expressing concerns about its domestic human rights issues and lack of compliance with its international human rights obligations. With regards to promoting and protecting human rights as a Council member, India currently takes a leadership role in just two of the many thematic issues addressed by the Council, and in no country-specific resolutions – demonstrating a lack of leadership on critical human rights issues.

The Universal Periodic Review

With regard to the UPR –  a mechanism by which every state’s human rights record is examined and recommendations for improvements made  – India has not shown progress in implementing recommendations, indicating a lack of substantive good-faith engagement in the mechanism.

In its last UPR review, at least 21 countries urged India to improve its protection of freedom of religion and rights of religious minorities, with several raising concerns over increasing violence and hate speech and the government’s adoption of discriminatory policies such as “anti-conversion” laws. In addition, 19 countries said that India should ratify the UN Convention against Torture, a treaty it signed in 1997 but never ratified. India said in both the 2012 and 2017 UPR cycles that it remained committed to ratifying the treaty. However, it hasn’t taken steps to fulfil its commitment even as torture and other ill-treatment continue to be used routinely by police and other security forces to gather information or coerce “confessions”.

The UN Special Procedures

Between 24 January 2011 and 24 September 2024, the Indian government received over 200 communications from UN Special Procedures, a collection of independent experts created by the HRC and mandated to monitor and report on human rights across the globe. The Indian government has only responded to less than a third of the communications it has received.

After the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party came into power in 2014, India has facilitated the completion of only two visits by a UN special procedure mandate to the country. It currently has 19 pending visit requests. Some have gone unanswered since 1999 (for example, from the Special Rapporteur on Torture).

The UN Human Rights Treaty Bodies

India is party to only six of the nine human rights core treaties. India ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) in 1979 and underwent its fourth periodic review, a process where member states submit reports to the Human Rights Committee on the enjoyment of civil and political rights in the country, in 2024 after a long gap of 27 years since its third review in 1997. The Human Rights Committee raised the same concerns that civil society has been warning about for decades, namely India’s failure to meet international human rights standards to address:

• discrimination and violence on the basis of religion, caste and gender
• violence against women
• trafficking and bonded labour
• overbroad counter-terrorism measures
• use of the death penalty
• torture and other ill-treatment
• lack of protection to migrants and asylum seekers
• unlawful surveillance
• content and data regulation
• crackdown on freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly
• arbitrary deprivation of citizenship
• rights of Indigenous Peoples

India ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) in 1976 and underwent its last review in 2008, eighteen years after the prior review. In its concluding observations, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights noted that India had provided incomplete, undetailed information and did not answer some of the questions posed to the country, which impacted the assessment. The Committee pointed to the absence of effective domestic mechanisms to effectively implement the Covenant and raised concerns regarding:

• discrimination
• low level of wages
• lack of social security protection to those working in the informal sector
• high incidence of domestic violence against women
• human trafficking
• high levels of poverty
• lack of a national housing policy leading to homelessness
• reports of forced evictions
• limited access to basic health services resulting in high infant and maternal mortality rates
• shortage of access to safe drinking water
• inadequate or lack of compensation to the victims of Bhopal Gas Tragedy
• low rates of school attendance amongst marginalized communities
• inadequate provisions of financial resources to human rights institutions

The sixth periodic report is currently 13 years overdue. While the implementation of the recommendations remains to be seen, the current government has started to crackdown on people’s economic, social and cultural rights in reprisal to those who exercise their civil and political rights. Amnesty International has documented the Indian authorities’ use of forced evictions and punitive demolitions as a means of meting out extra-judicial punishment to religious minorities like Muslims who dare to protest against the government’s majoritarian policies.

In addition, India’s reports under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and the Convention on the Rights of the Child are also overdue.

Engagement with OHCHR

India has also been the subject of two reports, in 2018 and 2019, from the OHCHR on the situation of human rights in Kashmir. Both reports called on the Indian authorities to respect international human rights obligations in the region, repeal or amend repressive laws such as the Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act and the Jammu & Kashmir Public Safety Act, end restrictions on journalists and investigate all blanket bans or restrictions.

However, instead of meaningfully engaging with the OHCHR, the Indian authorities called the reports “false, with a motivated narrative” and accused the human rights body of “legitimising terrorism”. On 5 August 2019, the Indian government unilaterally repealed the critical provisions of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution – which had guaranteed far-reaching powers to the state of Jammu & Kashmir on a wide range of issues except foreign affairs, defence and communication – and extended its control over the region. Jammu & Kashmir’s was then deprived of its statehood and split it into two separate union territories governed by the central government. The move was seen as a brutal dismissal of decades of protests against the human rights violations committed by the state and security forces in Jammu & Kashmir and an aggressive gesture to deprive the state’s inhabitants of their fundamental freedoms.

Reprisals

India has consistently been included in the UN Secretary-General’s report on reprisals, which sets out cases of alleged reprisals – against individuals and organizations – for cooperation with the UN in the field of human rights. In the 2020 report, the Secretary-General concluded that “ongoing intimidation and reprisals have reportedly deterred some civil society representatives from cooperating with the United Nations for fear of further retribution” in the country.

Why is credible engagement with UNHRC critical in the context of India’s UNSC bid?

Discussions about reforming the UNSC should not be done in isolation of candidates’ performance and behaviour at other UN bodies, most importantly human rights ones. Membership of any of the UN organs should be used to shine a spotlight on, and protect human rights, not to shield members or their allies from scrutiny of their human rights record.

It is abundantly clear that India is falling short of its domestic and international human rights obligations and its commitments as a member and in its interactions with different UN bodies and mechanisms. The discussion on reform of the Security Council may not end soon, but if India is serious about its intention to be a potential permanent member of the UNSC, it needs to demonstrate that it can engage responsibly with UN human rights entities, including the UNHRC. It must comply with the membership criteria to the UNHRC in a consistent and principled manner. It should commit to upholding the highest standards in the promotion and protection of human rights to fully cooperate with the UN human rights mechanisms.

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