கே.ஜி கண்ணபிரான் நினைவு சொற்பொழிவு , இந்தியா

K G Kannabiran (1929 to 2010)

“There is an overwhelming play of violence as power and power as violence, sometimes in breach of the law and sometimes as a tool for its enforcement. If violence in society is perceived as a breach of the law, the law itself is equally violent and in fact has an even more debilitating effect of its systematic and thorough ruthlessness backed by official sanction”   ..          The Wages of Impunity 

KG Kannabiran was one of India's greatest human rights activists, thinkers and lawyers. For over 40 years he relentlessly fought against state violence, police impunity and for the democratic rights of the disenfranchised. 

Born in Madurai, Kannabiran started practice in the Madras High Court and then shifted to Hyderabad in 1961. He began to defend political dissenters from 1969 onwards. In 1971 he successfully challenged the AP Preventive Detention Act, 1970 and during the Emergency defended scores of political prisoners. He appeared in the famous Secunderabad Conspiracy and Parvatipuram Conspiracy cases. He was President of APCLC between 1978-1994 and National President, PUCL between 1994-2009. He was involved with Justice VR Krishna Iyer in consultations on the rights of Sri Lankan Tamils. He was part of the `Concerned Citizen’s Committee’ which mediated between the AP Government and Maoists. He was part of the Concerned Citizen’s Tribunal which brought out a comprehensive report on the Gujarat carnage in 2002. 

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Justice C V Wigneswaran:

“Contrary to popular belief the end of the War has actually deepened the ethnic conflict. This is because the underlying causes for the conflict have not been addressed and in certain ways exacerbated. There is no point in declaring that there are no minorities in the country and that we are one people .... Instead of a pluralistic approach we have taken a majoritarian approach. (Another) policy failure is treating security and democratic freedoms as competing interests.  They are not – they are complementary of each other.  It is not a binary choice. Democratic freedom contributes towards national security....”. 

   Jus. Wigneswaran, 'Accelerated Provincial Freedom, the Way Forward', Feb, 2014.

Justice Wigneswaran is the first Chief Minister of the Northern Provinces in Sri Lanka and was sworn in on 7th October, 2013. He has had a long and distinguished legal career, first as an advocate then as a teacher of law and later as a Judge.  He was a Judge of the Sri Lankan Supreme Court between 2001-2004.

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The People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) is India’s largest human rights organisation. Formed in 1976 by Jayaprakash Narayan, Acharya Kripalani, Krishna Kant, Justice Tarkunde and others, PUCL has been in the forefront in defending civil liberties and human rights across India. PUCL has launched a range of activities to ensure that the State and its agencies, especially the police, are accountable as for example in issues of encounter deaths, in challenging police impunity in custodial violence and death cases and in ensuring justice for victims of caste, communal and state engineered violence and against phone tapping. Apart from these cases PUCL’s efforts led to major changes in election laws relating to disclosure of assets and criminal antecedents of election candidates, NOTA and in the passage of the Right to Food Security Act, 2013. Former Presidents of PUCL have included Justice Tarkunde, Prof. Rajni Kothari, Justice Rajinder Sachar and KG Kannabiran. Former General Secretaries include Prof. Chibber, Rajni Kothari, Dalip Swamy, Arun Shourie and Pushkar Raj. Presently Prof. Prabhakar Sinha is the President and Dr. V. Suresh, General Secretary of PUCL.