How is untouchability defined in Indian law? Article 17 of India's Constitution makes it mandatory to abolish all forms of untouchability but what does untouchability mean? There's also the protection of Civil Rights Act 1955, India that makes this illegal but even there untouchability isn't defined. Edit: The Civil Rights Act states Where any act constituting an offence under this Act is committed in relation to a member of a Scheduled Caste 1 ***, the Court shall presume, unless the contrary is proved, that such act was committed on the ground of &quot;untouchability&quot;. Does that mean it has to be absolutely proved that the grounds weren't untouchability? Edit: The act states that notwithstanding anything in the code of criminal procedure 1970 the offences shall be tried summarily, does that mean an appeal from a conviction in this law is impossible in that do summary trials effect appealability?
Untouchability refers to social practices with respect to those who are avarna, referring to the ancient 4 occupational classes identified by the varna system as exemplified by the Mānavadharmaśāstras. Anyone who is not kṣatriya, brahmin, vaiśya or śudra is avarna (&quot;outcaste; dalit; untouchable&quot;). Article 17 simply asserts that &quot;Untouchability&quot; is forbidden, leaving it to ordinary interpretation to figure out what that really means. The Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989. &quot;Scheduled Caste&quot; is invoked in Art. 341 of the constitution, which simply says (1) The President may with respect to any State or Union territory, and where it is a State after consultation with the Governor thereof, by public notification, specify the castes, races or tribes or parts of or groups within castes, races or tribes which shall for the purposes of this Constitution be deemed to be Scheduled Castes in relation to that State or Union territory, as the case may be (2) Parliament may by law include in or exclude from the list of Scheduled Castes specified in a notification issued under clause ( 1 ) any caste, race or tribe or part of or group within any caste, race or tribe, but save as aforesaid a notification issued under the said clause shall not be varied by any subsequent notification Leaving aside the further definition of those in a Scheduled Caste, the act lists numerous specific actions which are prohibited, the Offenses of Atrocities in Ch II, for example (a) puts any inedible or obnoxious substance into the mouth of a member of a Scheduled Caste or a Scheduled Tribe or forces such member to drink or eat such inedible or obnoxious substance You can summarize this as &quot;you cannot commit crimes against a member of a Scheduled Caste&quot;. The membership question is reduced to lists, for example The Constitution, (Scheduled Castes) Order, 1950. There are about 7 such orders for caste, and as many for tribes. Note that only Hindus can be in Scheduled Castes, and Sikhs are dealt with by listing relevant caste members as Hindus irrespective of their religious profession. It is unclear what the law says about the indigenous Christians e.g. Malankara Nasrani, who seem to be likewise treated as Hindu.
Is this interpretation correct? YES Encounters such as this should normally fall within the non-statutory stop &amp; account which covers police-initiated conversations with members of the public to ask general questions about their activities when there are no reasonable grounds to suspect an offence. The terminology varies from Force to Force, but can be summarised as: What are you doing? Why are you in the area? Where are you going? What are you carrying? There is no legal requirement or obligation to answer any of these questions, and the police cannot lawfully detain anyone to ask them - unlike the statutory powers under Stop &amp; Search and Arrest covered by the OP.
This depends on how far along you're waiting for court rulings to set in, and if you count laws of Congress passed under the 13th amendment's enforcement clause. There were quite a lot of things that got ruled as violations of the 13th and 14th amendments (mostly the 14th), but many were not ruled or legislated that way for decades. Some were even ruled to have an essentially opposite effect of what the current (overturning) precedents do. "Separate but equal" was challenged on 13th amendment grounds, but was upheld in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and wasn't overturned, on 14th amendment grounds, until 58 years later in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Your particular situation sounds like peonage, which was outlawed by Congress in 1867 via the enforcement clause. This law specifically banned "the voluntary or involuntary service or labor of any persons as peons, in liquidation of any debt or obligation, or otherwise." However, peonage cases continued to make their way into the courts for more than 40 years thereafter, such as Clyatt v. United States (1905)&mdash; which ruled that peonage was involuntary servitude&mdash; and Bailey v. Alabama (1911). These cases affirmed that the 13th amendment abolished not just chattel slavery but essentially all forms of involuntary or indentured servitude (except as punishment for a crime). Though exactly what qualifies as "involuntary servitude" is still something courts decide on a case-by-case basis; the draft doesn't, nor does mandatory community service to graduate high school.
There isn't an automatic exclusion rule for all forms of improperly acquired evidence in the UK. I can't find the exact quote but there was a judgement from a senior court that said in terms: &quot;it's not the court's job to discipline the police but to see that justice is done.&quot; However, judges have the discretion to disallow individual pieces of evidence if they think the interests of justice require it. Section 78 (1) of PACE (1984) has: In any proceedings the court may refuse to allow evidence on which the prosecution proposes to rely to be given if it appears to the court that, having regard to all the circumstances, including the circumstances in which the evidence was obtained, the admission of the evidence would have such an adverse effect on the fairness of the proceedings that the court ought not to admit it. Senior judges have been reluctant to lay down general guidelines, holding the trial judge best placed to make these decisions (although of course, subject to appeal). The foundational principle is the accused's right to a fair trial, so in principle one could appeal to the ECtHR under Article 6. However it generally takes a similar line to courts in the UK: It is not the role of the Court to determine, as a matter of principle, whether particular types of evidence - for example, unlawfully obtained evidence - may be admissible or, indeed, whether the applicant was guilty or not. The question which must be answered is whether the proceedings as a whole, including the way in which the evidence was obtained, were fair. PACE Section 78(2) is: Nothing in this section shall prejudice any rule of law requiring a court to exclude evidence. The general principle in 78 (1) does not override specific prohibitions: for instance, intercept evidence is never admissable under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.
While it is from a different jurisdiction, the following goes to the heart of the matter: Arrest, when used in its ordinary and natural sense, means the apprehension of a person or the deprivation of a person's liberty. The question whether the person is under arrest or not depends not on the legality of the arrest, but on whether the person has been deprived of personal liberty of movement. Directorate of Enforcement v Deepak Mahajan, (1994) 3 SCC 440 at ¶46 (SC of India) In your example, the police officer has been deprived of "personal liberty of movement"; if they can still speak there would be no legal impediment to them placing the person who arrested them also under arrest. It would then be incumbent on both parties to deliver each other into lawful custody. The citizen would need to seek out a law enforcement officer to do this; the police officer has already done so, being their own law enforcement officer. After this, comes the paperwork.
Law The origin of the phrase is from the Supreme Court of the United States in the case Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919). It specifically rules on the limitation of freedom of speech (first amendment): The original ruling is this: The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theatre and causing a panic. [...] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. As pointed out by @phoog, this does not saying anything about the lawfullness of shouting "fire", it says that if your speech creates a clear and present danger, the first amendment will not protect you, even if the danger does not result in actual harm. Commentary If these instances are correct then it would seem clear that Freedom of Speech is being honored as it's the result of speech, not the speech itself, that could be an offense. You seem to think that it should be illegal, but only if it results in a panic that endangers people. If people ignore you, you think it should be protected by your first amendment rights. That's not how the law works. The law tries, among other things. To establish norms for human behaviour. For example, you will be punished for driving an automobile while intoxicated, even of this does not result in you running over somebody. In the words of the supreme court: If your actions "are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger", the congress has the right to prevent you from doing so, despite the first amendment.
Article 1 of International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) defines &quot;racial discrimination&quot; to mean &quot;any distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference based on race, colour, descent, or national or ethnic origin which has the purpose or effect of nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise, on an equal footing, of human rights and fundamental freedoms in the political, economic, social, cultural or any other field of public life.&quot; The Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination CERD is the observing body for the ICERD and has not seen it necessary to define &quot;race&quot; under this instrument. To the contrary, it has adopted General Recommendations that clarify that the protections apply to particular groups of people without stating which of the listed categories they are best captured by. See this Introductory Note: CERD has adopted General Recommendations to clarify that the ICERD protections in article 1 include groups not explicitly named but who fall within the Convention’s broad criteria, such as women (G.R. 25), indigenous persons (G.R. 23), the Roma (G.R. 27), Dalits (G.R. 29), non-citizens including refugees (G.R. 30), African descendants, particularly those in the diaspora (G.R. 34), Muslims subjected to Islamophobia, and more generally persons whose religious identity has been “racialized,” that is used as a basis for discrimination (G.R. 32). In fact, the use of the term &quot;race&quot; was and is a contested aspect of the convention, as revealed through the travaux préparatoires (Patrick Thornberry, The International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination: A Commentary, Oxford University Press, 2016). The UNESCO report, &quot;The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry,&quot; was available to the drafters of the ICERD and it asserted that &quot;[t]here is no evidence for the existence of so-called 'pure' races.&quot; Some (e.g. Vieno Voitto Saario) were of the view that &quot;race,&quot; &quot;colour,&quot; and &quot;ethnic origin&quot; &quot;all meant much the same thing.&quot; It continues to be argued that CERD should &quot;repudiate the notion of race.&quot;
Yes, certainly. A prominent example was Lawrence v. Texas. The defendants were charged in state court with "deviate sexual intercourse". They moved to dismiss on the grounds that the statute was unconstitutional. Their motion was denied and they were convicted and fined; the denial was upheld by the state's court of appeals. They then appealed to the US Supreme Court, which eventually ruled that the statute was indeed unconstitutional. A defendant likely wouldn't have standing to sue the state for enforcing the law in general, only for enforcing it on the defendant himself.