Scrap 35-day limit on reporting rapes, HRW tells Nepal

September 23, 2014 04:30 pm | Updated 04:45 pm IST - KATHMANDU

Human rights bodies on Tuesday called on the Nepal government to remove 35-day statute of limitation on reporting cases of sexual violence and include survivors of the crimes as part of its compensation package.

That limitation makes it difficult to report crimes even if they wanted to, said Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Advocacy Forum Nepal said at a joint press conference in Kathmandu on Tuesday.

The HRW released a 78-page report >“Silenced and Forgotten: Survivors of Nepal’s Conflict-Era Sexual Violence,” which documents sexual violence by both government forces and the then (undivided) Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) combatants during the decade-long Maoist insurgency.

The two human rights bodies called on the government take immediate measures to encourage women to report crimes of sexual violence, including rape, which, they noted, carried huge social stigma, and on occasions led to domestic violence against them as well as abandonment.

The call comes at a time when the government has been unable to meet its own deadlines on naming members of Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which is to look into such crimes, among others.

“For more than 10 years already, these women have suffered in silence and fear while the perpetrators have walked free,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, South Asia Director, Human Rights Watch. “Justice and reparations for women who suffered sexual assault is long overdue unfinished business from the civil war.”

The international rights body said it had interviewed more than 50 women with the assistance of Advocacy Forum to document experiences of sexual assault during the conflict between 1996 and 2006.

When asked how the perpetrators who might not be identified given the time gap, Tejshree Thapa, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, pointed to a similar situation in former Yugoslavia where the principle of “command responsibility” was applied. The commander of the soldiers or combatants responsible for crimes would be held responsible if the individuals led by them could not be identified.

Kopila Adhikari of Advocacy Forum Nepal said they were also working to gather evidence against the alleged perpetrators and have gathered some evidence.

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