Mamata Banerjee faces activists' fury for headless rights body

KOLKATA: A number of human rights activists have recently come down heavily on the chief minister Mamata Banerjee for not appointing a full-time chairman for the West Bengal Human Rights Commission (WBHRC) and running the organisation with the former director general of police Naparijat Mukherjee as its acting chairman.

“It is very funny that WBHRC is being run by an acting chairman who was the former director general of police.Even though there is no legal bar for appointing a retired IPS officer as the chairman of our human rights body, we cannot accept it because we feel that police is the biggest human rights violator. As per the Human Rights Act, the post of chairman of WBHRC should be given to a retired Supreme Court or a high court judge. Since January this year, WBHRC is being run by an acting chairman and he is a retired IPS officer.

We want the government to look into the problem and appoint a full-time chairman as per the Human Rights Act,“ Sujato Bhadra, a prominent human rights activist, said. He said that since January the WBHRC was being run by Mukherjee after retired Supreme Court judge Asok Kumar Ganguly resigned from the post of chairman following his alleged involvement in a sexual harassment case.

Noted intellectual Sunando Sanyal also said that the WBHRC had failed miserably to address cases of human rights violation and “the state government should appoint a full-time chairman immediately."

Senior government officials, however, made it clear on Thursday that the government had no immediate plans to appoint a full-time chairman for the commission. About 50 people who had approached the WBHRC to get justice, recently met President Pranab Mukherjee and chairman of the National Human Rights Commission KG Balakrishnan and complained about the WBHRC and its failure to handle human rights violation cases effectively.