Misuse of Anti-Terrorism Laws and the Obligation to Remedy: The Indian Context

Since 9/11, India has witnessed a growing number of unjust incarcerations based on misapplication of anti-terrorism laws. Even in cases of eventual exoneration, accused people spend considerable time in prison, and experience significant difficulties reintegrating into society. Nevertheless, state authorities and judiciary routinely refuse them compensation or rehabilitation.

This project uses empirically informed, socio-legal approaches to understand the accountability, rule of law, and human rights implications of this phenomenon and the case for reparation. Framed by socio-historical understandings of 'terrorism' narratives in post-independence India, and using a range of legal, historiographical, political, and sociological sources, firstly the constitutional and international human rights implications of large-scale misapplication of counter-terrorism law and associated failure to remedy or compensate individuals, and explanations for the apparent reluctance to ensure reparation of affected individuals will be identified.

Through this contextualised socio-legal analysis, hypotheses will be developed about these harms that will shape the empirical work that follows. Applying interpretive phenomenological analysis, an empirically informed account of those harms to understand whether they reflect, exceed, or confound those identifiable through the initial analysis will be developed.

This will involve analysis of both existing and newly generated data sources. Existing data will be drawn from newspaper, periodical, online, civil society and archival interviews and accounts, and published biographies and autobiographies of formerly accused and imprisoned persons, their families, lawyers, and other stakeholders. This corpus will include sources published in English, Hindi, and Urdu, all of which I have fluency in.

Adding to these existing data sources two original data sets will be developed.

1) A corpus of relevant, autobiographical publicly available social media content from Twitter/X, Instagram, Telegram, etc. This dataset will be an original contribution in itself and generate valuable insights.

2) After appropriate ethical approvals, I will undertake semi-structured interviews with civil society actors, advocates and former judges who have worked on terrorism-related cases in India and with whom I have trusted relationships from study and practice in New Delhi. I intend to do this in person, subject to the University's robust risk assessment.

If in-person fieldwork is not approved, I will seek to do interviews remotely or with relevant actors when they are travelling outside of India. In the event, that none of these options can be pursued for risk or ethics-related reasons, or that insufficient interviewees can be sourced, robust understandings will be developed through the existing and original data sources analysed and generated in the earlier research phases described above.

This research therefore makes three major original contributions. First, it develops an empirically informed account of material damage to rights, accountability, and the rule of law by misuse of counter-terrorism law. Second, it develops a robust approach to remedy through compensation and reintegration, intervening in ongoing debates on remedies for counter-terrorism-related rights violations.

Third, it bridges the inter/national divide in much counter-terrorism scholarship by considering whether (and how) international obligations to criminalise terrorist activity contribute to domestic misapplication of counterterrorism laws.

It thus adds to developing scholarship identifying the human rights costs of transnational counterterrorism through its focused engagement with the obligation to remedy, offering insights for India and other jurisdictions where misapplication of counter-terrorism laws raises similar difficulties.