Rainbow Charter is a column on international law and queer rights, with a keen focus on macro international law as well as deeper micro LGBTQ laws. This column also maps the current LGBTQ laws based on geographic regions and also aims to summarise progressive LGBTQ judgements from around the world and how it shapes the international context.
Can we attribute a number to human life? Is it okay to ‘buy’ and ‘sell’ flesh and blood?
Sex work in India has had a plethora of legalisation framework issues till date. While the de facto criminalization is precarious for both policy and legislation, decriminalization of sex work is necessary for the physical and emotional inviolability of sex workers, their rights to life, labour, health, and their reproductive and sexual rights. According to the National AIDS Control Organization, there exist 8,00,000 documented sex workers in India-unofficial figures run to further staggering...
Sex work in India is problematic to say the least. In signing the International Convention, the Trafficking Protocol, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights as well as the Convention for Elimination of All Kinds of Discrimination Against Women, India has evidenced the legislative motive of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, which does not expunge sex workers for their contribution to the sex trade. Yet it fails to preserve their rights or protect their persons as sex workers continue to remain replaceable pawns in a vicious network of organized crime.
16 March 2019, Mumbai: Mumbai First, in association with K. C. College, organized a panel discussion on Judicial Pendency: Challenges and Solutions at the K. C. College on Saturday, 16 March, 2019.
One Future Inspire is a series of interviews with young people across countries, borders, spectrums of work and being. These people share a common quality — they inspire us. Our aim is to bring their work to the fore with the hope that it might ignite a spark in someone, somewhere.
Team One Future interviewed Devyani Kacker, advocate and specialist in international criminal law and transitional justice.
In the Indian Penal Code, 1860, a veritable tome that makes for the most literal symbol of justice served, the provisions relating to criminal defamation sit cosily between sections pertaining to cruelty meted out to a wife by her husband, and criminal intimidation. Section 499 of the Indian Penal Code criminalises speech that is purported to vilify or malign the reputation of any person. Section 500 outlines the punishment for criminal defamation, which...
Parliamentarian Shashi Tharoor’s 2018 bill on the restoration of the sexual, reproductive and menstrual rights of women creates a space at the table for a conversation which has so far only been confined to the more liberal mindsets of the country. By putting forth a bill which crystallizes women’s agency and independence in a positive sense, the questions plaguing women’s emancipation shift from an abstract sort of in-the-air discussion about their theoretical rights,...
The month-old Sabarimala judgment given by the Supreme Court of India has opened the floodgates to a massive nationwide conversation on how Indians view women, morality and the normalization of the inherently problematic ways in which we treat both. Whether it is addressing the stigma associated with menstruation, or the parallelism with the #MeToo movement, or taking on the broader aspect of institutionalized gender discrimination, Sabarimala has pulled its fair share of skeletons out of the closet. However, has the seemingly straightforward verdict in Sabarimala paved the way for something even greater?
Scintillating glass bangles and curvy traces, red pouts and hair adorned with jasmine; lascivious manoeuvres of hemlines too short: illegal by night, ostracised by day. This is a plausible melange of the imagery that term sex worker arouses. Gratifying the hushed desire of millions, a ‘vice’ that is most pronounced in the night and silenced out of existence in the day. An outcast community, with needs and desires as mainstream as us, these...