Because women’s rights are human rights

duty towards women? In any event, this measure will make a significant dent in Indian rape cultures.

More measures are needed. Explicit Constitution-based guidelines should stipulate obligations regulating executive discretion in matters such as clemency, parole and outright amnesty for sex-offenders. The presiding officers of Parliament and state legislatures need to reframe legislative rules of business that enable the prioritisation of legislative consideration of violent crimes against women. Further, appointment of judges at district levels and their elevation to high courts and the Supreme Court should take full account of their judicial performance, including utterances from the bench, that betray a lack of sensitivity and sensibility towards women's rights as human rights. This requirement should extend to elevation from the bar to the bench.

Even granting that Right to Information Act-type disclosures about judicial appointments may not best subserve public interest, apex justices still need to assure the wounded citizenry that their collegiate practices actually avoid elevations violative of Article 51 A.

The four law teachers who dared write an open letter to the Chief Justice of India in the 1970s concerning the Mathura verdict, initiated some enduring gains of law reform via reasoned public debate, even without the mixed blessing of 24x7 instant mobilisation of mass opinion. Their message still holds — combating political rape cultures invites Herculean labours directed towards the reformation of state rationality and the institutions that sustain it. Further, the theatres of mass public protest need also to engage, with equal determination, the notion that a violation of women's rights is a violation of human rights in the prevalent societal rape cultures.

The writer is emeritus professor of law at the University of Warwick, UK

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