Officials of OHCHR (the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights) has called for prosecution against those guilty in the August 17 rioting in Kapilvastu district, in which carnage, violence and looting were perpetrated, particularly against people of hilly stock, on the pretext of the killing of a local leader belonging to the Muslim community by unknown people for unknown motives. OHCHR deputy high commissioner Kuang Hua Kang

and OHCHR Nepal high commissioner Richard Bennett, who recently led the OHCHR team to the riot-torn area for stock-taking, held a press conference at Bhairahawa on Friday, and said that the district had not still returned to the normalcy of pre-Aug 17 level. They said that things would become normal again only when the guilty were brought to justice. Indeed, as they said, displaced people have not returned to the district yet for reasons of insecurity. The culprits are enjoying impunity (in the words of Bennett, they are roaming freely) and the administration has not been able to provide guarantees that the horrors will not visit again.

Despite the end of Maoist insurgency and the long way the peace process has come, human rights violations are still happening around the country. Extra-judicial killings, according to the latest compilation, come to many dozens over the past one year alone, by any reckoning an alarmingly high number. The state forces, Maoist cadres, and various Tarai outfits have accounted for the largest proportion of such deaths. And the cases of torture, extortion, intimidation, displacement, currently particularly in the Tarai, and denial of other human rights go to make the total picture far from encouraging. To reduce the scale and incidence of the violations, it is necessary to bring the culprits to justice effectively. The reason why human rights are so routinely and brazenly violated in the country even now is that the violators have felt emboldened in their nefarious acts, as law has not touched most of them at all.

Sadly, this has been so even after the historic Jana Andolan II nearly two years ago – after the successful movement has been billed as being the harbinger of a New Nepal, where, among other things, human rights will take a pride of place. Even the people held guilty by the Rayamajhi Commission, who run to many dozens, have not only been let go, as it seems, but virtually all of those people who held government posts have retained them or some of the accused have even been promoted. It appears the commission had been set up to still public calls for severe action against those who had committed excesses in a bid to suppress Jana Andolan. Public hopes are fading that the guilty will ever be brought into the dock. Calls by domestic and international human rights agencies and groups to end the state of impunity in Nepal have not met with a high degree of success, though their pressure has not been entirely without effect, either. It is the important donors with various kinds of influence in Nepal that could play considerably constructive roles in this respect, but, it seems, their priorities by and large lie elsewhere.