Justice Vaidyanathapuram Rama Iyer Krishna Iyer was a noted judge who became a pioneer of judicial activism in India. He pioneered the legal-aid movement in the country. Before that, he was a state minister & politician. As an activist lawyer, he served jail terms for the cause of his poor and underprivileged clients. He was seen as an ardent human-rights activist. In addition, he campaigned for social justice & the environment. A sports enthusiast and a prolific author, he was conferred with the Padma Vibhushan in 1999. His judgements continue to be cited in the higher judiciary.
Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum [1985 (1) SCALE 767 = 1985 (3) SCR 844 = 1985 (2) SCC 556 = AIR 1985 SC 945], commonly referred to as the Shah Bano case, was a controversial maintenance lawsuit in India, in which the Supreme Court delivered a judgment favouring maintenance given to an aggrieved divorced Muslim woman. Then the Congress government enacted a law with its most controversial aspect being the right to maintenance for the period of iddat after the divorce, and shifting the onus of maintaining her to her relatives or the Waqf Board. It was seen as discriminatory as it denied right to basic maintenance available to Muslim women under secular law. Indore, Madhya Pradesh, she was divorced by her husband in 1978. She filed a criminal suit in the Supreme Court of India, in which she won the right to alimony from her husband. However, the Muslim politicians mounted a campaign for the verdict's nullification. The Indian Muslims some of whom cited Qur'an to show that the judgement was in conflict with Islamic law. It triggered controversy about the extent of having different civil codes for different religions in India. This case caused the Congress government, with its absolute majority, to pass the Muslim Women Act, 1986 which diluted the judgment of the Supreme Court and restricted the right of Muslim divorcées to alimony from their former husbands for only 90 days after the divorce. However, in the later judgements including the Daniel Latifi case and Shamima Farooqui v. Shahid Khan, the Supreme Court of India interpreted the act in a manner reassuring the validity of the case and consequently upheld the Shah Bano judgement and The Muslim Women Act 1986 was nullified. Some Muslims including All India Shia Personal Law Board supported the Supreme Court's order to make the right to maintenance of a divorced Muslim wife absolute.
Public interest litigation (PIL) refers to litigation undertaken to secure public interest and demonstrates the availability of justice to socially-disadvantaged parties and was introduced by Justice P. N. Bhagwati. It is a relaxation on the traditional rule of locus standi. Before 1980s the judiciary and the Supreme Court of India entertained litigation only from parties affected directly or indirectly by the defendant. It heard and decided cases only under its original and appellate jurisdictions. However, the Supreme Court began permitting cases on the grounds of public interest litigation, which means that even people who are not directly involved in the case may bring matters of public interest to the court. It is the court's privilege to entertain the application for the PIL.
The death penalty is a legal punishment in India, and is permissible for some crimes under the country’s main substantive penal legislation, the Indian Penal Code, 1860, as well as other laws. Currently, there are around 403 prisoners on death row in India. The most recent executions in India took place in March 2020, when the four men convicted of gangrape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in December 2012 were hanged in the Tihar Prison Complex in Delhi.
Indira Jaising is an Indian lawyer who is noted for her legal activism in promoting human right causes. In 2018 she was ranked 20th in the list of 50 Greatest Leaders of the World by Fortune magazine. She also runs an NGO with the name of Lawyers' Collective, the license of which was permanently cancelled by the Home Ministry for violations of Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. The central government of India accused the NGO of using foreign funds in a manner not mentioned in the objectives of the NGO. However, the Bombay High Court has passed the order to de-freeze the domestic accounts of her NGO.
Konakuppakatil Gopinathan Balakrishnan was the former Chairperson of the National Human Rights Commission of India. He is a former Chief Justice of India. He was the first judge from kerala to become the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. His tenure lasting more than three years has been one of the longest in the Supreme Court of India. In 2010, he was conferred with an honorary doctorate by Cochin University of Science and Technology.
Prashant Bhushan is a public interest lawyer in the Supreme Court of India. He was a member of the faction of the India Against Corruption (IAC) movement known as Team Anna which supported Anna Hazare's campaign for the implementation of the Jan Lokpal Bill. After a split in IAC, he helped Team Anna form the Aam Aadmi Party. In 2015, he made several allegations against the party's leadership, its functioning and its deviation from the core ideology, values and commitments. He is one of the founders of Swaraj Abhiyan and Sambhaavnaa, an Institute of Public Policy and Politics.
Khusro Faramurz Rustamji, better known as K F Rustamji, is the only police officer in India thus far to have been awarded the Padma Vibhushan, India's second highest civilian award. This award has been in recognition of his multifarious achievements, including the Public Interest Litigation (PIL).
The Human Rights Law Network (HRLN) is a collective of Indian lawyers and social activists who provide legal support to the vulnerable and disadvantaged sections of society. It works on child rights, disabilities rights, rights of people living with HIV/AIDS, prisoners' rights, refugee rights, rights of indigenous people, workers' rights, and rights of the minorities and people who have faced or are subject to sexual violence, among others.
Aruna Ramchandra Shanbaug, was an Indian nurse who was at the centre of attention in a court case on euthanasia after spending 37 years in a vegetative state as a result of sexual assault.
Neri Javier Colmenares is a human rights lawyer and activist. He was an associate of the Asian Law Centre at Melbourne Law School when he was completing his Ph.D. in law on "The Writ of Amparo and the International Criminal Court." He also lectured at the University of Melbourne on International Human Rights Law and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court.
Amitabh Thakur is a 1992 batch Uttar Pradesh cadre Indian Police Service (IPS) officer and a social activist. He has served as a Superintendent of Police (SP) in ten districts of Uttar Pradesh, and as an Inspector General (IG) in the state's Civil Defence department.
Anand Grover is a senior lawyer known for legal activism in Indian law relating to homosexuality and HIV. Along with his wife Indira Jaising, he is a founder-member of the Lawyers Collective. He was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health from August 2008 to July 2014. He is currently and acting member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy.
The 2012 Delhi gang rape and murder case involved a rape and fatal assault that occurred on 16 December 2012 in Munirka, a neighbourhood in South Delhi. The incident took place when Jyoti Singh, a 23-year-old female physiotherapy intern, was beaten, gang-raped, and tortured in a private bus in which she was travelling with her male friend. There were six others in the bus, including the driver, all of whom raped the woman and beat her friend. Eleven days after the assault she was transferred to a hospital in Singapore for emergency treatment but died two days later. The incident generated widespread national and international coverage and was widely condemned, both in India and abroad. Subsequently, public protests against the state and central governments for failing to provide adequate security for women took place in New Delhi, where thousands of protesters clashed with security forces. Similar protests took place in major cities throughout the country. Since Indian law does not allow the press to publish a rape victim's name, the victim was widely known as Nirbhaya, meaning "fearless", and her struggle and death became a symbol of women's resistance to rape around the world.
Manohar Lal Sharma is an Indian lawyer.
Ajay Agarwal is a lawyer in the Supreme Court of India and a politician. He is the candidate representing the Bharatiya Janata Party from Rae Bareli in the 2014 Indian general election. During his tenure on the Supreme Court, he filed public interest litigations in several cases including the Bofors scandal, the Taj corridor case, and the fake stamp paper scam run by Abdul Karim Telgi.
Laxmi Agarwal is an Indian acid attack survivor, a campaigner for rights of acid attack victims, and a TV host.
Lily Thomas was an Indian lawyer who initiated improvement and change to existing laws by filing petitions in India's highest court and regional courts. Thomas' petitions resulted in changes to laws to prevent convicted politicians getting elected, the addition of a new marriage law and protections for parliamentarians. Thomas was hailed most notably for petitioning to amend the Representation of the People Act.
Menaka Guruswamy is a Senior Advocate at the Supreme Court of India. She is a B.R. Ambedkar Research Scholar and Lecturer at Columbia Law School, New York. Guruswamy has been visiting faculty at Yale Law School, New York University School of Law and University of Toronto Faculty of Law. She is known for having played a significant role in many landmark cases before the Supreme Court, including the Section 377 case, the bureaucratic reforms case, the Augusta Westland bribery case, the Salwa Judum case, and the Right to Education case. She is assisting the Supreme Court as Amicus Curie in the case pertaining to the alleged extrajudicial killings of 1,528 persons in Manipur.
Kaleeswaram Raj is an Indian lawyer practising in the Supreme Court of India and the High Court of Kerala. He has successfully argued for decriminalisation of the offence of adultery in India.
