People's Watch
The vision of People's Watch is "To create a society free from human rights violations and discrimination by cultivating a human rights culture through the participation of a pluralistic society."
The primary work of People’s Watch (PW) has been seeking justice for the victims of human rights violations and making the state accountable for such violations. Human Rights violations focused upon include:
- Police torture and other police excesses,
- Custodial deaths and encounters,
- The death penalty, and
- Violations against Dalits and women.
PW strives to seek adequate compensation for the victims, punishment of the perpetrators and rehabilitation of the victims. In the process, it undertakes fact finding missions, immediate local interventions and legal interventions. While such interventions are in progress, PW makes simultaneous efforts to provide immediate protection, shelter, medical/hospitalization services and care/support to family and close affiliates of the victims.
People’s Watch also engages in other forms of justice work, including:
- Protection of Human rights defenders,
- Mobilizing citizens to participate in human rights movements,
- Strengthening access to justice information,
- Educating school children on human rights, and
- Organizing Dalit villages to obtain livelihood rights.
One of the demonstrated successes of PW has been that of systematic human rights monitoring, which includes fact finding missions and a series of interventions.
In 1995, when organizations were daring to speak about human rights, it was People’s Watch that began saying that the State should be held accountable for human rights violations. Independent fact finding of human rights violations, local interventions, applying pressure to the state and national human rights commissions/institutions, intervening in the court of law - all these actions helped to make the state accountable and resulted in the victims obtaining justice.
A number of human rights organizations today and their fact finding missions rely upon models created by People’s Watch. Also, PW has been instrumental in defining the role of the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) to the general public.
Another note-worthy success of PW is shifting the responsibility of human rights monitoring from an institutional approach to a citizen-centered approach. It is the belief of PW that human rights monitoring cannot be sustained unless it becomes a public agenda. Therefore, during the last 3 years, PW has begun promoting Citizens Cells in each village of the state of Tamil Nadu and has been helping them organize to promote human rights. So far, there are more than 1400 such citizens’ cells which are actively pursuing human rights agendas.
Instantaneous response to a violation, local intervention and legal pursuit, mobilization and campaigning are some of the strategies that PW has been employing.
Last updated on Thursday, October 9, 2008.
