Category: India
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Event: Contemporary Issues in Indian Public Law: Transnational Perspectives, 12 April 2015
The Faculty of Law, University of Oxford, Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne and National Law University, Delhi invite you to a conference on ‘Contemporary Issues in Indian Public Law: Transnational Perspectives’. The conference will be held on the 12th of April 2015 at National Law University, Delhi. To attend the conference, please register here.…
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Comment on India: Chintan Chandrachud: Koushal v Naz: The Third Way Out
December 11, 2014 will mark one year from the day on which the Indian Supreme Court delivered one of its most heavily criticised judgments in recent history – Suresh Kumar Koushal v Naz Foundation (Koushal). The Court’s holdings in that case are only too well known by now. But briefly, it reversed a Delhi High…
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Comment on India: Chintan Chandrachud: Dance Bars, Dialogue, and the Indian Supreme Court
An interesting constitutional narrative, involving the government of the Indian state of Maharashtra and India’s Supreme Court, is developing. In 2005, the state legislature enacted primary legislation imposing a ban on dance performances in bars, except in certain establishments such as hotels rated three-stars and above. The rationale provided for the ban was that many…
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Tarunabh Khaitan: NALSA v Union of India: What Courts Say, What Courts Do
The Indian Supreme Court has recently delivered an important judgment in the case of National Legal Services Authority v Union of India (NALSA). A two-judge bench comprising Justices Radhakrishnan and Sikri declared, among other things, that hijras (a traditional Indian male-to-female trans group) must be treated as a ‘third gender’ for all legal purposes, and…
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Tarunabh Khaitan: Koushal v Naz: The Legislative Court
In Koushal v Naz—the case being touted as one of its worst judgments—a two-judge bench of the Indian Supreme Court has overturned a 2009 decision of Delhi High Court which had struck down the criminalisation of sodomy by s 377 of the Indian Penal Code 1860 as unconstitutional. In doing so, it has recriminalized every…
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Chintan Chandrachud: Beyond Ghaidan and Back: the Supreme Court of India on Rights-Compliant Interpretation
Ghaidan v Godin-Mendoza remains the leading case on rights-compliant interpretation under section 3 of the UK Human Rights Act 1998. In Ghaidan, the majority on the House of Lords held that even when the meaning of a statute seems clear, courts can depart from parliamentary intention to read legislation in a European Convention-compliant manner. Lord…
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Christopher Forsyth and Nitish Upadhyaya: Crown Immunity after the End of Empire in Hong Kong and India
Crown Immunity is a recondite branch of Public Law that seldom makes an appearance in the Law Reports but it does potentially raise grave constitutional issues. It is surely ‘fundamental to the rule of law that the Crown, like other public authorities, should bear its fair share of legal liability and be answerable for wrongs…
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Chintan Chandrachud: Prisoner Voting Rights in India
Whether prisoners should have the right to vote has been the subject of intense political debate in the UK for a few years now. In Hirst ((2006) 42 E.H.R.R. 41) as well as Scoppola ([2012] E.C.H.R. 868), the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held that blanket prohibitions on the voting rights of convicted prisoners…
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Menaka Guruswamy: Of Generals, Judges and Constitutional Democracies
On July 3, General Fattah al-Sisi, the 58 year old Chief of the Egyptian Army announced on television that the army had removed President Mohammad Morsi from power and suspended the constitution. In this same televised address he informed the people that the Chief Justice of Supreme Constitutional Court would be the interim President till…