KATHMANDU, Jan 27: Although the two transitional justice bodies--Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and Commission for Investigation of Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) -- are just two weeks away from completing one year since their inception, the two bodies remain idle for lack of the necessary regulations.
The two commissions were formed in the spirit of the Interim Constitution of Nepal 2007 and the comprehensive peace accord, to probe instances of the serious violation of human rights and find the status of those who were disappeared in the course of the armed conflict between the state and the then Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) from 13 February 1996 to 21 November 2006.
The two commissions have forwarded drafts of their regulations to the cabinet for endorsement, but these have been dumped at the Bills Committee of the Council of Minister for the last seven months.
Tabling a regular report in parliament on Tuesday, Sushil Kumar Shrestha, chairman of the parliamentary Social Justice and Human Rights Committee, said, “The two transitional justice bodies have been rendered defunct due to lack of the respective regulations.”
The commissions have no role except for their staff to sign the attendance register and draw their monthly salaries and allowances, Chairman Shrestha said. The committee has urged the House to get the government to frame the respective regulations without further delay.
“The UCPN(Maoist) party has some concerns over provisions in the draft regulations of the two commissions and has sought some time to sort out the contentious issues,” said Minister for Peace and Reconstruction Eknath Dhakal.
According to Bills Committee sources, the Maoists have strongly condemned the provisions relating to the issuance of arrest warrants against the perpetrators, invalidation of their passports, and the courts handing down verdicts in conflict-era cases even as the two commissions have yet to begin their work.
The Maoist party's minister on the Bills Committee has also objected to provisions in the draft that make it mandatory to seek the victims' consent for pardons even after the courts order pardon for the perpetrators, according to the source.
However, other political parties represented on the Bills Committee are not persuaded by the arguments put forth by the UCPN(Maoist), and have been conducting a series of discussions on these issues.
"We prepared the draft of the TRC regulations as per the spirit of 'The Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act, 2071 (2014) and forwarded it to the government on time,” TRC Commissioner Shree Krishna Subedi said. But the government has delayed in providing a legal framework, thus delaying the actual functioning of the commissions, he said.
Even as the regulations have not yet been formulated, the commissions have been intensifying their interactions with the victims and other stakeholders in more than 50 districts to date, and they have received public feedback on serious issues pertaining to the conflict era incidents and crimes.
According to the two commissions, they are preparing to seek complains from victims against the perpetrators once the relevant regulations are formulated. The then government had formed the TRC under the chairmanship of Surya Kiran Gurung and the CIED under the leadership of Lokendra Mallik, in February 2015. The commissions were mandated for two years with the probability of a one-year term extension.
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