JLU National Workshop on Human Rights, Terrorism and Emergency Situations

Above all human rights, the right to peace is the most basic.

The absolute violation to the right-to-peace is "Terrorism - an attention seeking crime". The dreadful memories of 11/9 and 26/11 are still fresh in our minds, where the injury to human life was gruesome, when new wounds have been inflicted in a frenzy of incidents of terrorism in Syria, Barcelona, London, Manchester, Paris, Stockholm, and many more. These have imposed the need to revisit and revise our strategies of handling terrorism and emergency situations. Keeping this agenda in mind, the JLU, School of Law in collaboration with the King’s College London organized a one day workshop on “Human Rights, Terrorism and Emergency situations.”

It is truly said that young minds have the brightest ideas. The workshop was aimed at providing a platform where experts from various fields could interact with the bright minds at JLU Bhopal, enlighten them and gain their perspective on the situation at hand.

The guests were Dr. (Prof.) Satvinder Singh Juss, Professor of Law, King’s College London, Justice G. Raghuram, Director, National Judicial Academy, Bhopal and Mr. Sanjeev Shami, Chief, Anti-Terrorist Squad (Madhya Pradesh).

The workshop started with a discussion about the evolution of human rights and their prominence today. Human rights are those fundamental rights that a person is inherently entitled to, by the virtue of being born human. Unfortunately the recent public outrage in Haryana violated the basic right-to-life where many people were injured and lives were lost. This poses a question to our approaches to dealing with emergency situations.

The faiths of people, often religious and spiritual are used in a manipulative manner to obtain selfish ulterior motives out of them. The root causes of terrorism can be narrowed down to ethno-nationalism, discrimination, religion, socio-economic status and political grievances. It is only a handful of people who brainwash and control the masses that execute terrorist activities. There can be many reasons as to why people follow such evil, but it all comes down to lack of education that leads to blind faith in such immoral ideologies.

ATS Chief, Mr. Sanjeev Shami enlightened the students about the process and minutiae of dealing with an emergency situation, the major work of which is done in the aftermath of an incident when the slips and faults are identified and cured for circumventing similar events in future.

The whole session turned out to be a productive discussion where concrete solutions to combat terrorism at global and local level along with anti-terror laws in the contemporary world were highlighted.