Interviews

20 Articles
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In this podcast, Project 39A’s Director (Sentencing) Neetika Vishwanath speaks to Dr. Mayur Suresh (Senior Lecturer, SOAS University of London) on his recently published book ‘Terror Trials: Life and Law in Delhi’s Courts’. The book is an ethnographic study of Delhi’s Tis Hazari court over 14 months during which Dr. Suresh followed 18 terrorism trials. In this conversation, Dr. Suresh reflects on the relevance of ethnography as a method of legal research and the value of studying everyday life in trial courts. Looking beyond the exceptionalism framework in academia that is often used to describe terrorism laws and trials, ethnography allowed Dr. Suresh to capture ways in which terror accused use legal procedures and technicalities to engage with the law.

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Apart from the specific concerns the Supreme Court’s recent judgment on the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 raises, there are broader issues raised by this decision which need to be addressed. What is the purpose of having special laws like PMLA in the first place? Are these purposes served by the current framework? Maneka Khanna gets in conversation with Shri Singh to explore these questions.

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The recent dismissal of the challenges to the provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 has given grounds for much criticism. Irrespective of the controversy surrounding the judgment, it stands to be the law on the question of money laundering for now. In this conversation between Harsh Srivastava and Arshdeep Singh Khurana, we take a detour from the critique and address how the judgment may be used as part of a defence strategy in money-laundering cases.

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What went wrong in the Supreme Court’s recent decision concerning the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002? Was it a faulty interpretation of the provisions of the Act? A misplaced application of precedent? A general lack of clarity concerning the principles at play? Shivani Misra of Project 39A speaks to Senior Advocate Aman Lekhi on what the Supreme Court could have done differently while balancing the rights of the individual against the State’s power.

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In light of the Supreme Court quashing the Delhi High Court judgement disallowing the termination of pregnancy after 24 weeks; Anupriya Dhonchak speaks to Dr. Aparna Chandra about the undue barriers that hinder access to safe abortion in India.

In the backdrop of the US Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, this conversation considers the impact of paternalistic state policies in undermining the bodily integrity and personal autonomy of women, and argues for locating the right to abortion within the framework of substantive equality.

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Hrishika Jain and Prof. Aya Gruber discuss the carceral form of feminism’s engagement with sexual violence, its implications for victims and feminism’s own transformative goals, and the unfulfilled promise of the #MeToo movement as an alternative form of feminist politics.

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In this episode of the P39A Podcast, Devina Malaviya speaks to Philip Mayor of American Civil Liberties Union, Michigan about the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) in the criminal justice system. They discuss the fallibility of the technology and how its use impacts the investigation process. They further explore FRT’s tendency to give the colour of science to biases present in the system.

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In this episode of the P39A Podcast, Dr. Amrita Ibrahim, Dhanya Rajendran and Hartosh Singh Bal discuss the institutional incentives and assumptions that inform the creation of a media ‘crime story’. The conversation explores the lens that the media adopts in reporting crime, and the perspectives it leaves out, and highlights possible paths towards a more sensitised and ethical coverage of criminality.

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This episode of the 39A podcast discusses the science behind forensic DNA profiling and its scientific and legal practice in India. The conversation further looks at the DNA Technology (Use & Application) Regulation Bill, 2019 and how the current version of the Bill overlooks the issues with the forensic science system currently functioning in India.

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In this episode of The 39A Podcast, Professor Vijay Raghavan and Dr. Anup Surendranath discuss the institutional imagination of prisons in India and the manner in which it has interacted with the COVID-19 pandemic. The conversation looks at whether the measures taken by prisons to control the pandemic were at best management strategies and failed to incorporate ‘right to health’ perspectives.

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In this episode of The 39A Dialogues, Senior Advocate and criminal law practitioner Ms. Nitya Ramakrishnan discusses what sets apart the stringent bail provision under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967 and makes it almost impossible for an accused to secure bail once charged for offences of ‘terrorist activities’ and ‘terrorist organization’ under the Act. She comments on the decision of the Delhi High Court from June 2021, granting bail to three student activists – Asif Iqbal Tanha, Natasha Narwal and Devangana Kalita while coming to the finding that that their acts of protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 did not meet the standard of a ‘terrorist act’ as defined under the UAPA. Ms. Ramakrishnan argues that the decision of the Delhi High Court is logically sound and does not come in conflict with the Supreme Court’s 2019 landmark ruling in Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali.