Amnesty International Wants FATF To Review India’s Obliteration Of Human Rights, Crackdown On Dissenting Voices

Amnesty International, Charity and Security Network and Human Rights Watch have urged the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to call on the Indian government to stop prosecuting, intimidating and harassing human rights defenders, activists and non-profit organisations on the pretext of countering terrorist financing

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 4th Nov, 2023) Amnesty International, Charity and Security Network and Human Rights Watch have urged the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to call on the Indian government to stop prosecuting, intimidating and harassing human rights defenders, activists and non-profit organisations on the pretext of countering terrorist financing.

The global human rights watchdog, in its latest report, said that FATF members would start their fourth periodic review of India’s record on tackling illicit funding on November 6.

It said that Indian authorities exploited FATF’s recommendations as part of a coordinated campaign to restrict civic space and stifle the rights to freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly.

The Indian government has particularly targeted human rights groups and activists working to protect the rights of the most socially and economically marginalized populations.

“Draconian laws introduced or adapted to this end include the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act (FCRA), the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), and the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). Their actions have flouted both FATF’s standards and international human rights law,” it said.

“The Indian authorities have weaponized laws to crack down on the human rights work by HRDs, activists and non-profit organizations in the country,” said Aakar Patel, chair of the board at Amnesty International India.

They were using bogus foreign funding and terrorism charges to target, intimidate, harass and silence critics, in clear violation of FATF standards, he added.

The Indian government also enacted the 2002 Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA) to satisfy membership conditions set by the FATF.

In recent years, the report said, authorities used the law to attack, intimidate and harass human rights defenders, activists and non-profit organizations by supplementing the charges under FCRA, seizing their properties, and burdening them with stringent bail conditions.

“Amnesty International India has been subject to action under the PMLA through the freezing of its bank accounts in September 2020, putting its work on hold for the past three years, without funds to even secure effective legal representation,” it added.

Meenakshi Ganguly, Deputy Asia Director at Human Rights Watch said, “India’s three laws together have created a dangerous arsenal with debilitating consequences for civil society and human rights activists.

” The FATF should not allow the Indian government to exploit the organization’s recommendations for its political purposes – to silence all forms of dissent, he stressed.

Amnesty International further said that since the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) came to power in 2014, the authorities have used overbroad provisions in domestic law to silence critics and shut down their operations, including by cancelling their foreign funding licenses and prosecuting them using counterterrorism law and financial regulations.

The Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, first enacted in 1976, was aimed at preventing and regulating foreign interference in Indian politics.

However, in 2010, the government repurposed the legislation with a greater focus on non-profit organizations, while relaxing foreign funding oversight for political parties.

In the last 10 years, the authorities have used this law to cancel the licenses of over 20,600 non-profit organizations, including 6,000 in 2022, blocking their access to foreign funding.

Indian authorities have also frequently used the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), India’s primary counterterrorism law, to arbitrarily arrest and detain human rights defenders and activists, it said.

The law was introduced as a reform to the draconian Prevention of Terrorism Act in 2004, but the government amended it in 2008, 2012 and 2019 to include many problematic provisions of the Prevention of Terrorism Act.

The counterterrorism funding provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act have been misused against several student activists who had organized protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act.

The counterterrorism financing and other provisions have also been misused to detain Khurram Parvez, a prominent Kashmiri human rights activist who is program coordinator of the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, and Irfan Mehraj, a journalist associated with the coalition, the report said.

The delay in filing charges and several acquittals in these cases showed that the government was using the counterterrorism law to keep critics locked up for years and use the judicial process itself as a tool to persecute and punish government critics.