A report on Foreigners in Indian Prisons - Stangers to Justice
Uploaded: over 3 years ago; Last updated: over 3 years ago ; Date of Publication: January-2019
All India
2015 - 2018
English
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Strangers to Justice is an outcome of CHRI’s experience of working on issues of detention and repatriation of foreign nationals in Indian prisons for nearly ten years. CHRI took up the issue of foreign nationals in 2009, starting with Bangladeshi nationals lodged in prisons across West Bengal and working with partner organisations in Bangladesh. Simultaneously, it also began to facilitate the repatriation of Indians in Bangladeshi prisons back to the country. In due course, it started providing assistance to prisoners of other nationalities as well. As more cases were received, hitherto unknown issues began to come to our attention. Over the years, we have visited and interacted with a large number of foreign nationals confined in the prisons of West Bengal, Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and Assam.
Research Report
This report documents and examines the challenges faced by foreign national prisoners (FNPs) in India. While prisoners, in general, are vulnerable due to asymmetrical power dynamics and the closed nature of places of detention, this report is an effort to understand the special vulnerability of foreign nationals stemming from their non-Indian nationality or statelessness. The analysis is anchored by the data collected from 22 states and four Union Territories through Right to Information requests filed by CHRI to heads of all 36 state prison departments across the country.
