Human Rights of the Non-Citizen: Law and Reality

The problem of protection of human rights for the non-citizen is one of the burning issues of the modern time. Although since post-World War II UNO and some economically developed and developing countries have taken certain initiative to frame international and regional human rights and refugee instruments, but inspite of these more than 150 million people worldover, the people who are the victims of genocide, ethnic and political conflicts and sufferers from acute poverty and forced to migrate in other countries, are the worst sufferers. Gross violation of human rights are perpetrated against these hapless people regularly by the countries where asylum and/or refuge is sought. They are the non-citizen that is refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and other undocumented immigrants (some time called as illegal immigrants or intruders). On the other hand it may be mentioned that India, like her other neighbouring Asian countries does not have any refugee law and governmental stand regarding treatment of refugees/asylum seekers depends on ad-hoc and case to case basis. Certain rights are generally attributed to non-citizen in general under our constitution but freedom of speech, expression, movement, etc. are not available to them. Therefore, the author, keeping in view the above contention has endeavoured to bring home a book on this subject.  This book focuses attention on the conceptual and legal development of the rights of non-citizen in international and Indian perspectives. Role of the executive, legislature, judiciary including NHRC has elaborately and critically discussed. Problem on protection of human rights of the non-citizen women and children in global and national perspectives has separately been discussed. The approach of the book is to look into the problems with the comprehensiveness of both substantive and procedural laws in international and national level as well as the real state of affairs of the issue of human rights protection scenario of non-citizen.