Caste discrimination not exclusive to India: UNHRC head

Caste discrimination not exclusive to India: UNHRC head

BureauUpdated: Saturday, June 01, 2019, 09:47 PM IST
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Johannesburg: UN Human Rights Commissioner Navi Pillay today said the caste discrimination is not unique to India, which has tried to avoid it being raised at international fora despite having done a lot of work to eradicate it.

Pillay was delivering a lecture on ‘Human Rights Achievements and Challenges in a Rapidly Changing World’ at the University of the Witwatersrand as part of South Africa’s celebration of Human Rights Month.

“We can’t just relate caste to India, because it happens in many parts of the world,” Pillay said in reaction to a question from the floor about why so little was being done by her office to address the caste issue in India.

“I have actually met groups who are subject to discrimination against caste in Nepal and Japan, but India peculiarly thinks this word caste belongs to them and I know they have a political position that it should not be raised in international fora.

“They objected to my raising this issue when I was on a mission in India while I was actually supporting the Human Rights Commission in India that had raised the matter.”

Pillay said the UNHCR had done a lot of work around caste, but conceded that it was not enough, as had been alleged by NGO’s.

“Let me acknowledge immediately that actually of all the countries India has done the most to address caste discrimination.

They have very good laws, excellence jurisprudence from the supreme court, they have people from the so-called lower castes now sitting in government and being governors of states.

“It’s a huge country – they have done their laws, but obviously they have to do much more because the system persists.”

Pillay described how a group of women from a lower caste consigned to cleaning latrines with their bare hands had come to see her.

“They went around breaking some of these latrines. They brought me one of the bricks as a souvenir and I have been displaying it in my office. India is a huge, well-established democracy, but human rights must always be addressed, you can’t rest on your laurels because you are an old established democracy.”

“Nobody knows this better than us at the UNHRC and we have to watch the situation,” Pillay concluded.

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