New Delhi: Five national law schools have come together to launch a collaborative legal aid clinic for those excluded from the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) list in Assam.
The initiative, titled ‘Parichay’, currently includes the National Law University and Judicial Academy, Assam; the West Bengal National University of Juridical Science, Kolkata; NALSAR Hyderabad; National Law University, Delhi; and the National Law University in Odisha.
According to a press statement, a few other law schools are also in the process of formalising their collaboration with Parichay.
Legal aid within 120 days
Over 19 lakh people have been excluded from the final NRC list that was released on 31 August.
Those excluded can file appeals against their exclusion within 120 days from the receipt of their rejection order, before the foreigners’ tribunals.
Parichay intends to function as a “clearing house of litigation and research assistance” for lawyers filing these appeals.
It’ll help them in drafting appeals, conducting research on pertinent questions of the law, training lawyers and paralegals, and generating documentation on the functioning of foreigners’ tribunals. Additionally, law students will work with lawyers and assist them in all these tasks.
Parichay will be headquartered in Guwahati, with teams of student volunteers across the country, and a faculty adviser in each collaborating university for smoother coordination.
“Students will be selected through a selection process to constitute a core team and a pool of volunteers for research and drafting,” the release said. “The core team will work with the programme director to coordinate Parichay’s activities between lawyers and student volunteers.”
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The founding team
Parichay’s founding team includes Anup Surendranath, M. Mohsin Alam Bhat, and Darshana Mitra.
Surendranath is an assistant professor at the National Law University, Delhi, and Bhat is an assistant professor at the Jindal Global Law School. Mitra, a lawyer and researcher based in Kolkata, is planning to switch base to Guwahati for the time being.
“We started talking about it before the list came out,” Mitra told ThePrint. “But we were anticipating that there would be a huge number of people that would potentially be excluded from the list and it turned out to be true. Given that they’ll have just 120 days to file an appeal, they’d need all the help that they could get.”
“We sensed that law students are actually interested in getting involved in legal clinics. Given the scale of exclusion that we’re seeing here, we wanted something that’s very collaborative,” she added. “Because one single law school can’t possibly take on the burden of providing legal aid to all 19 lakh people. And that’s how we came up with this model.”
Prof. Faizan Mustafa, vice-chancellor of NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad, also lauded the effort. “After the NRC, absence of effective legal aid would mean that many persons would be rendered stateless without due process,” he said. “An innovative collaboration like Parichay is essential to prevent such a humanitarian crisis.”
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This is exactly the sort of collaboration pro bono that gives one such hope for my beloved country.
The people of India as individuals are the best most kind hearted in the world.
It is a pity we have been misled by politicians of all hues.
Never has a country’s millions of poor suffered such injustice and misrule from its leaders.
The people of India deserve better and here we see people coming together to make Indis great again in an inclusive way without religious polarisation.
The Savakar RSS ideology which leads to destruction and partition will be countered by people like these.