January 17, 2023: A guest lecture was organized by Alliance School of Law on the topic “Human Rights and Indian Constitution”. The focus of the event was to make students aware about the importance of the human rights and how they relate to Indian Constitutionalism and thereby how Indian Constitution provides for the human rights of every person.

The lecture was delivered by expert speaker, Dr. Ashwini K. P. who started off by sharing a brief introduction about herself and the position that she holds as the sixth Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. She gradually introduced the concept of human rights and what is the importance of human rights in today's world. She also talked about the United Nations constant effort to provide basic human rights to each person without any sort of discrimination. She discussed the various aspects of human rights, especially the granting of human rights to those who have been subjugated to discrimination and oppression so far in this world. She explained with illustrations various forms of discrimination and how people are denied these basic human rights as well.

Dr. Ashwini narrated about the marginalized communities and their human rights. Citing the example of discrimination happening with Afro-Americans, she explained the denial of human rights to the people because of various kinds of discrimination based on color, gender, creed, caste, etc. She touched upon the aspect of how Indian Constitution aims to provide rights to all citizens of the country and is intolerable of discrimination on any such grounds as mentioned in Article 15 of the Indian Constitution. She narrated her own life experiences for the students to make them understand how people from marginalized communities are suppressed, oppressed and subjugated to discrimination and denied their basic human rights.

Dr. Ashwini spoke about the aspect of oppression that women face and denial of their rights and that this aspect arises to a large extent because of the patriarchal mindset of the Indian society. She also mentioned how Indian women in many places are subjected to their rights but with many conditions. She discussed about the concept of equal pay for equal work and gave the example of a recent change that was introduced by BCCI to pay the women cricketers as much as men cricketers are paid.

At the end of the guest lecture, students asked different questions and Dr. Ashwini answered them all patiently helping students have clarity on the topic. Students shared their personal point of view about rights and shared some sort of experiences. Overall, the session was very fruitful for each one of them and every bit of the session was meaning-fully absorbed by the students.