The evil called 'honour killing'

KOCHI: The so-called honour killings are turning out to be a social evil and need to be tackled effectively before it gets out of hand, National Human Rights Commission Chairman Justice KG Balakrishnan has said.

Effective police investigation is needed to probe such cases, most of which come under the ‘criminal’ category, but are often not reported.

Justice Balakrishnan was speaking on the sidelines of the national seminar on ‘Concept of Panchayati Raj and Human Rights’ organised in Kochi on Friday.

There are effective laws already to probe such cases and it needs effective policing because these are registered as criminal cases, he added.

Responding to a question on whether the NHRC received complaints alleging human rights violation in police raids against activists of the Popular Front of India, Balakrishnan said they had got complaints and the Commission was doing the follow-up.  “We are waiting for the DGP’s report,” he added.

Justice Balakrishnan said that ever since he became the chairman, the NHRC has been receiving more complaints from Kerala. Unfortunately, these are personal complaints and do not fall under the category of human rights violations.

Earlier, in his inaugural address, he stressed on the need for the NHRC to have more coordination with panchayats to ensure implementation of all its programmes. “We would like to have excellent coordination with panchayats and would like to have all our programmes implemented through them,” he said.

Giving Kerala credit for its effective Panchayati Raj system, Justice Balakrishnan said that it was working exceedingly well in Kerala state compared to other states.

There was a confusion when the seminar started with the speakers addressing the audience in Hindi until someone from the audience put a request to Justice Balakrishnan asking that English or Malayalam be used so that most people could understand. However, the confusion continued to persist with only a few speakers being able to communicate in a language other than Hindi.