500 entries found
On 19 June, Les Forums France Inde organised a round table on Dalits, caste discrimination and the persistence of untouchability in contemporary India. The discussion addressed Dalit exclusion in education, employment, public spaces and access to justice, as well as discrimination ranging from everyday contempt to severe violence, often with impunity. The panel brought together South Asia scholar Christophe Jaffrelot, writer Ari Gautier, graphic designer Ajitesh Lokhande and author and filmmaker Valentin Henault, moderated by Eléonore Gratton. Speakers reflected on Dalit perspectives, strategies of resistance, the continuing relevance of Dr B. R. Ambedkar’s thought, and the role of movements in India and the diaspora in advancing dignity, equality and emancipation.
Can mental health care address trauma without addressing caste? At a conference in Bengaluru, the National Federation of Dalit Women and The Blue Dawn brought practitioners, activists and artists together to explore care rooted in social justice. During the conference, NFDW also celebrated 30 years of its journey by honouring 30 anti-caste individuals and organisations from India who have worked closely with NFDW over the years.
Dalit feminist leaders from India and Nepal met in Bangalore, India, for a week of shared learning and organising. The National Federation of Dalit Women (NFDW) and the Feminist Dalit Organization (FEDO), both IDSN members, strengthened connections across borders and explored the challenges facing Dalit women and girls through capacity-strengthening sessions, exchanges between movement leaders and exposure visits to community initiatives in Bangalore, fostering cross-border feminist solidarity and shared learning.
At a UN Human Rights Council side event on the right to sanitation, Dalit human rights defender Manjula Pradeep highlighted how caste and gender discrimination shape who bears the burden of unsafe and degrading sanitation work. Drawing attention to the risks faced by Dalit women engaged in hazardous sanitation work in India, she urged governments to end manual scavenging in practice, ensure safe working conditions and alternative livelihoods, and include sanitation workers and Dalit women in decision-making. “Sanitation cannot be called dignified if it depends upon another person’s indignity,” she said. The event was co-organised by IDSN and reinforced that progress on sanitation must be measured not only by access to facilities, but by whether systems protect everyone’s health, dignity, equality, and rights.
IDSN brought together #DalitVoicesForJustice, UN experts, civil society and Member States for our HRC62 side-event, Caste, Gender and Power: #DalitVoicesForJustice on 2 July at the UN Human Rights Council. The event highlighted the urgent need to explicitly address caste and gender discrimination as a root cause of widespread human rights violations across South Asia. This was underscored by powerful addresses from the UN Special Rapporteur on Racism, Dr. Ashwini K.P. and the UN Special Rapporteur on Minority Issues, Prof. Nicolas Levrat.
The UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has issued wide-ranging recommendations to India to strengthen action against caste discrimination, reaffirming that caste-based discrimination is fully covered by the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Following its August 2026 review of India, CERD raised concerns over persistent segregation, caste-based violence, discrimination against Dalit women, barriers to justice, manual scavenging, bonded labour and discrimination in education and access to services. The Committee called for stronger implementation of existing protections, improved access to remedies and better data on the situation of Dalits. Ahead of the review, IDSN and Minority Rights Group International submitted a joint alternative report documenting continuing caste-based discrimination and gaps in implementation of previous CERD recommendations.
The European Parliament has adopted a resolution condemning forced conversion and child marriage in Pakistan and calling for stronger protection of girls from marginalised communities. Significantly, the resolution explicitly recognises discrimination based on caste, gender and religion among the root causes that must be addressed and calls for targeted protection, improved access to education and social protection, stronger investigations and access to justice. IDSN has raised these concerns over several years through submissions to UN mechanisms, regularly shared with EU institutions, documenting how forced conversion and marriage disproportionately affect Dalit girls. Earlier this year an IDSN delegation of Dalit activists visited Brussels to brief key decision-makers while Pirbhu Satyani of the Pakistan Dalit Solidarity Network raised forced conversion and marriage during the European Parliament’s April 2026 hearing on caste discrimination in South Asia. The resolution also calls on the EU and Member States to raise these issues systematically in their dialogue with Pakistan, including in relation to Pakistan’s GSP+ trade preferences.
Published by the Feminist Dalit Organization (FEDO), this report draws on official records, civil society data, media coverage, and consultations to examine how caste and gender intersect in violence against women and girls in Nepal. FEDO documented 439 incidents involving Dalit women and girls across 18 districts, including domestic violence, child marriage, caste discrimination, and sexual violence. The report identifies barriers to reporting and justice, and calls for better data disaggregated by caste and gender, stronger survivor support, and more effective enforcement of legal protections.
The Human Rights Measurement Initiative’s (HRMI) 2026 India report highlights a range of human rights concerns affecting Dalits. Based on assessments from human rights experts and practitioners in India, the report identifies Dalit communities as particularly vulnerable to violations of physical integrity rights, while Dalit Muslims and Dalit Christians are specifically identified as being at risk of arbitrary arrest. Hindu Dalits are also reported to face restrictions on freedom of religion and belief, including discrimination in places of worship. On economic and social rights, the report points to displacement, exclusion, residential discrimination and segregation, as well as people being forced into manual, caste-based work. The findings form part of HRMI’s broader assessment of continuing human rights concerns in India.
The report Dalit Women’s Long Road to Justice: Monitoring 10 Years of SDG 5 in India through Caste, Gender and SRHR Lens, by All India Dalit Mahila Adhikar Manch - AIDMAM, offers an evidence-based assessment of progress and persistent gaps in achieving gender equality for Dalit women in India over the past decade. Drawing on official data, existing research and primary interviews conducted in 2025 in Bihar, Haryana, Maharashtra, and Telangana, the report shows how caste-based patriarchy continues to shape discrimination, violence, harmful practices, barriers to justice and unequal access to sexual and reproductive health and rights.
At an OECD side session on 10 February, speakers highlighted caste discrimination as a serious and often overlooked human rights risk in global supply chains and called for stronger action to address it through human rights due diligence. The virtual session, From Principles to Practice: Addressing Caste and Advancing Nondiscrimination in Supply Chains, was hosted by the Fair Labor Association in collaboration with Arisa, IDSN and the National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights. The discussion focused on how caste-based discrimination continues to affect workers in supply chains and on what companies can do in practice to identify, prevent and address these harms.
The UN Special Rapporteur on minority issues, Professor Nicolas Levrat, has urged Nepal to take stronger action to ensure that Dalits and minority communities can fully enjoy their rights after meeting with several IDSN members in Nepal.
During Nepal’s fourth-cycle Universal Periodic Review (UPR), UN Member States’ recommendations called for stronger action against caste-based discrimination, “untouchability”, and related patterns of exclusion and violence affecting Dalits, including Dalit women and Dalit children.
At the Eighteenth session of the UN Forum on Minority Issues in 2025, IDSN delegates highlighted the urgent need to address caste discrimination, violence and exclusion across South Asia. Dalit delegates from South Asia raised concerns around institutional impunity, structural marginalisation of Dalit women and the shrinking civic space for human rights defenders. They also emphasised the vital contributions of Dalit women workers and activists in fostering accountability, dignity and social cohesion at local and global levels
This report presents a rigorous analysis of the last five years of data from the National Crime Records Bureau (#NCRB), exposing alarming trends in caste-based atrocities and revealing persistent gaps in the implementation and enforcement of the SC/ST (PoA) Act. It highlights systemic failures across stages of justice delivery ; from FIR registration and investigation to prosecution and conviction, raising serious concerns about institutional accountability. Beyond documenting the scale and patterns of caste-based violence, the report advances urgent and actionable policy recommendations aimed at strengthening monitoring mechanisms, fixing accountability at every level of governance, improving the implementation of legal safeguards, and ensuring meaningful access to justice for Dalit communities across India. It calls for structural reforms that move beyond symbolic commitments toward measurable, time-bound change.
This briefing highlights the responsibilities of fashion companies in relation to the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights: Implementing the United Nations “Protect, Respect and Remedy” Framework (UN Guiding Principles), and assesses the key ways in which fashion companies compound the failure of states and factory employers to protect workers and respect freedom of association. In this briefing, Amnesty International analyses the areas where fashion companies can work harder to promote freedom of association and decent working conditions across their supply chain in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. We identify how the current model of complex supply chains and privatized auditing in the industry diffuses responsibility and places a low value on the labour of the predominantly female garment workers, solidifying an exploitative business model which fashion companies need to address at its core. We make recommendations for how these companies can play a much larger role in promoting freedom of association for workers in their supply chain. This briefing is designed to be read alongside Amnesty International’s Stitched Up: Denial of Freedom of Association for Garment Workers in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka which looks in more detail at the human rights violations in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, and the role of states and employers (supplier factories).
The Amnesty International report “Left Behind in the Storm: Dalit Women Sanitation Workers and the Fight for Water and Dignity” (2025) reveals how Dalit sanitation workers in Bangladesh—especially women in coastal Khulna and Satkhira districts—endure extreme exclusion. They are systematically ignored in climate adaptation, water and sanitation programmes, and disaster relief, while contending with intersecting caste and gender discrimination, lack of inclusive infrastructure, and economic precality. Many lack household water connections and must travel long distances or pay for water, work in informal sanitation roles without recognition or protection, and are excluded from decision-making. The impacts of climate shocks (floods, cyclones) exacerbate their hardship and drive further exclusion. “Caste and gender-based discrimination, lack of inclusive infrastructure, economic marginalization, and climate vulnerability have converged to entrench cycles of exclusion and indignity,” said Isabelle Lassée. “The findings by Amnesty International reflect a deeper national failure to uphold the rights of Dalit sanitation workers. The absence of caste-disaggregated data, targeted funding, and inclusive policymaking continues to leave Dalit communities significantly behind.”
The policy paper details how women from communities discriminated on the basis of work and descent (e.g. Dalit, Haratine etc.) suffer overlapping, structural discrimination combining gender, caste or descent, and socio-economic marginalization. It shows that these women face exclusion from basic services, disproportionate poverty, unsafe and informal employment, violence and harmful traditional norms, lack of political voice, and barriers in education and health. The report underscores that existing laws and policies often fail to reach them, either through weak implementation or because they are not designed with descent- and gender-sensitive lenses. It offers examples of promising practices and calls for state and UN actors to adopt intersectional approaches: data disaggregation, legal recognition of descent-based discrimination, targeted policy action, meaningful participation of affected women, and stronger accountability mechanisms.
In January 2025, Ethical Trade Norway convened a seminar titled “Responsible Trade with India – What Must You Know?” to explore the complexities of engaging with India’s vast and diverse market. The event underscored the critical importance of understanding caste-based discrimination, particularly against Dalits and Adivasis, within global supply chains. The Dalit Solidarity Network Norway also played an active role in the Seminar.
This report explores caste-based discrimination and challenges that Scheduled Caste workers face in Karachi’s export-oriented textiles and garment industry. While previous research has examined informality and marginalisation in the sector, there have been no previous studies of factors like race and ethnicity, religion and caste, beyond gender.
