Criminal Justice Clinic
February 21, 2024 2024-05-15 11:48Criminal Justice Clinic
Criminal Justice Clinic
Clinics
Criminal Justice Clinic
The Criminal Justice Clinic started as the Legal Aid Clinic in 2009. In the last decade, the clinic was committed to a raft of issues, including child rights, disability rights, family disputes, and climate change. Our efforts included community engagement programs, periodic legal awareness drives, right to information-based research, legal interventions in court, conferences in collaboration with grassroots organisations, and policy interventions. Recognizing the clinic’s community engagement work, it was awarded the prestigious Hebert Smith Freehills’ award in 2017.
For over 15 years, Legal Aid Clinic (LAC) worked tirelessly to ease access to justice by providing legal awareness, advice, and intervention through engagement with the community. At the same time, the clinic critiqued the inadequacy, and in many cases, the complicity of the law in furthering the vulnerability of marginalised groups. Over the years, the clinic has worked on advancing legal knowledge and assisting underprivileged persons to navigate the often-overwhelming maze of legal systems.
The CJCl expands on this focus, with the intent to address systemic barriers in criminal justice which directly impact the right to life and personal liberty. At the same time, CJC continues to be a collaborative enterprise comprising students, faculty members, lawyers, grassroots activists, and communities that will endeavor to inject criticality, empathy, and rigor, while retaining its core philosophy of assisting the marginalised and holding the legal system truly accountable to Constitutional principles. CJC sustains collaborative engagement and foregrounds questions around the possibilities of breaking barriers that systemically keep marginalised communities in detention.
Vision and Mission
CJC aims to bring together reflective classroom clinical teaching, high-quality interdisciplinary research, advocacy, and legal interventions such as undertrial bail applications to effect meaningful change in the criminal justice system, facilitate transnational conversations and help mitigate forms of systemic and everyday suffering while remaining mindful that the communities affected the most by these systems also hold the most valuable knowledge in combating such strictures.
Work undertaken by Criminal Justice Clinic in 2023
Advocacy work
- Prisoners with adequate education and relevant legal training can provide regular and timely legal assistance and advice to other prisoners. To utilize this untapped resource, the Criminal Justice Clinic at Jindal Global Law School in collaboration with India Vision Foundation, with the support of the Uttar Pradesh Prison Department initiated the Prayatna project in Dasna District Jail to build the capacity of prisoners who could then identify prisoners in need of legal assistance and accordingly provide advice and assistance. During the period from September 2022 to September 2023, the clinic continued its jail visits to Dasna district jail to guide paralegal volunteers who are providing legal assistance to new entrants in the jail. The clinic assisted the prisoners by submitting legal aid applications on their behalf and ensuring legal representation. The clinic also wrote letters on behalf of undertrial prisoners to help restore their interaction with families. Given the lack of support and action by the DLSA, the clinic has decided to discontinue the Prayatna Project.
- The Criminal Justice Clinic made a submission to the Parliamentary Committee on Home Affairs on 3rd November 2023. The submission made recommendations to the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) Bill. The submission looks at specific provisions of the BNSS bill relating to Arrest, Maintenance of Public Order, Police’s power to Investigate, and Bail. The recommendations made are based on a review of Constitutional and statutory provisions, Supreme Court judgments, and international standards.
- The clinic in collaboration with India Vision Foundation has previously undertaken work with the Uttar Pradesh Prison Department. The department in July 2023 requested CJC to review their jail manual based on national and international standards on prisons. The objective of this project is to undertake a comparative analysis of certain aspects of the UP Jail Manual with the existing standards and good practices on prison management and safeguards protecting and advancing the rights of prisoners.
- The clinic in collaboration with the Sonipat Police Department is undertaking a study to systematically analyse the causes of violent crime in Sonipat. The objective of this study is to analyse the patterns and trends around reported crime in Sonipat and understand the causes of crime in select crime-prone villages in the district. Based on the crime data for the last five years, the Sonipat police department has identified 26 villages across three zones that have seen higher instances of violent crime. Through this study, researchers from JGU will undertake interviews with community members in these select villages as well as review case documents in select cases of violent crimes.
Conferences/Webinars/Guest lectures
- National Consultation on Incarceration in India: Rights and Reforms in February 2023- The consultation brought together representatives from Prayas, TISS, Project 39A, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Project Second Chance, and former incarcerated persons.
Courses/ Summer and Winter Clinic/paralegals:
- A one-year clinical course titled “Criminal Justice and Rights of Persons in Custody” has been developed to acquaint students with the nuts and bolts of the Indian criminal justice system with a specific focus on persons in custody. The course will familiarize students with police, prison, and legal aid institutions, their functioning, alongside the legal framework under which they operate. An important element of the course is to understand the situation of undertrial prisoners in India, the barriers they face in accessing justice, and the impact of their identities on vulnerability in custodial settings.
- Winter Clinical Programme 2023: The Winter Clinic at CJC was undertaken from 2nd January to 31st January 2023 where five students were part of the clinic supervised by Prof. Raja Bagga. The students of the clinics worked on the Police Custody Death Monitor (PCDM) Project, a collaboration between CJC and the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI). The students researched police custody deaths in 2022 in Delhi, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Assam, West Bengal, Puducherry, Ladakh, and Jammu and Kashmir. The students compiled this information, reviewed the NHRC portal for these cases, analysed the information gathered from the reporting of these deaths to eventually develop a note on custodial deaths and accountability in these States.
- Summer Clinical Programme 2023: The Summer Clinic was undertaken from 3rd July to 31st July 2023 where five students of the law school worked under the supervision of Prof. Raja Bagga. The students of the clinics worked on a) the Criminal Litigation Project under Advocate Ajay Verma, and b) the Police Custody Death Monitor (PCDM) Project, a collaboration between CJC and the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI).
- The Criminal Justice Clinic initiated two projects with six student paralegals on 15th August 2023. The two projects are a review of Criminal Laws and a Review of the UP Jail Manual 2022.
Publications
- Commemorating Nelson Mandela Day, the Criminal Justice Clinic, in collaboration with India Vision Foundation and Uttar Pradesh Prison Department launched the compendium on International Standards on Imprisonment on 24th July 2023. The compendium, encompassing the Nelson Mandela Rules, the Bangkok Rules, and the Tokyo Rules is a result of a collaborative project undertaken by the Clinic and India Vision Foundation.
