Hidden Apartheid: Caste Discrimination Against India's "Untouchables"

My friend Jeena Shah co-authored this shadow report on caste discrimination against Dalits (untouchables) in India, as part of her clinic experience at NYU. See also the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice' website (scroll down to "What's New"). Jeena and the other co-authors will be presenting the report to the UN Committee on Racial Discrimination next week, which is pretty damn exciting.


Apparently the UN Committee on Racial Discrimination has already posed several of the questions suggested by Jeena et al. to India, under the following protocol (as described by Jeena herself):

"One of the obligations a country has under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination is to periodically submit reports on what they've done to eliminate discrimination and what problems they are having. India is up for review this year. India submitted its periodic report (failing to address caste discrimination at all - saying that caste discrimination doesn't fall under the Convention, in contradiction to what the Committee has said). After a country submits their written report, the Committee asks them specific questions, and then during the session (next week) India has to come before the Committee and answer those questions. In our report, we drafted a list of questions we wanted the Committee to ask India based on our research, and about 15 of the questions the Commmittee posed to India were pulled from our report. India is obligated now to answer those questions. (You can see the questions we wanted asked in the first 10 or so pages of our report - where we summarize the critical issues and bullet point questions under each issue.)"

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