Impunity

The finding

The United Nations put it in one sentence:^[1]

In nearly three decades that the law has been in force in Jammu and Kashmir, there has not been a single prosecution of armed forces personnel granted by the central government.

UN OHCHR, Update on the situation of human rights in Kashmir, 8 July 2019, para. 13

A precision worth stating, because it is the kind of thing a hostile reader checks: OHCHR’s statement covers the period up to its publication in July 2019. The Armed Forces (Jammu and Kashmir) Special Powers Act came into force in 1990, so the law is now in its thirty-sixth year. This site does not assert that no sanction has been granted since July 2019; it asserts what the UN found, and notes that no publicly reported sanction has come to light since. If one has, tell us and it will be added.

How the mechanism works

AFSPA does not say that soldiers may not be prosecuted. It says something more effective.

Section 7 is not an immunity clause on its face. It is a permission requirement. The difference matters, because it means impunity does not have to be defended in public. Nobody declares a soldier innocent. The file simply never opens. There is no hearing, no evidence tested, no judgment to appeal — and, crucially, nothing for a court to strike down, because the decision to withhold sanction is an administrative one taken by the same government whose forces are accused.

Pathribal is the illustration. The Central Bureau of Investigation — India’s own federal investigating agency — concluded that the March 2000 killing of five men presented as massacre perpetrators had been staged. Proceedings against the accused soldiers were then closed, because the Army declined to grant sanction. The investigation succeeded and the prosecution never began.

What Amnesty International found when it went looking

“Denied”: Failures in accountability for human rights violations by security force personnel in Jammu and Kashmir (Amnesty International, July 2015, ASA 20/1874/2015).^[2] Twenty-five years after AFSPA’s introduction, Amnesty found that the law “continues to feed a cycle of impunity”, and that not a single member of the security forces deployed in the state had been tried for human rights violations in a civilian court.

Amnesty’s method is worth noting, because it is documentary rather than testimonial: interviews with fifty-eight family members of victims, Right to Information applications, examination of police and court records, and interviews with civil society groups, lawyers and government officials.

The military courts

Where proceedings do occur, they occur inside the institution accused. OHCHR recorded in 2019 that the Indian Army had been resisting efforts to release details of trials conducted by military courts in which soldiers were initially found guilty but were later acquitted and released by a higher military tribunal.^[3]

The Machil case followed that path: convictions by court martial, then relief from the Armed Forces Tribunal. A system in which the only convictions are handed down by the accused institution, and then quietly undone by its own appellate tribunal, is not accountability. It is the appearance of accountability.

Why the commissions cannot fix it

The State Human Rights Commission can inquire and recommend. It cannot compel the prosecution of armed forces personnel, because that requires the central sanction Section 7 reserves. Its 2011 findings established 2,730 unmarked graves and identified 574 of the 2,156 bodies examined in north Kashmir, and recommended investigation; the graves are still unexhumed fifteen years later. File 03 →

And the route to the commission is barely used. Of the 432 torture cases documented by APDP and JKCCS, only 27 ever reached the SHRC at all. File 02 → When a remedy is known to be futile, people stop seeking it — and the resulting absence of complaints is then cited as evidence that there is nothing to complain about.

Who, by name and rank

Section 7 works by keeping one question unanswered: who. In December 2012 the International People’s Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir, with APDP, published a 356-page report that answered it — and answered it, in the report’s own words, “using information gleaned mostly from official State documents.”^[5]

That method matters more than any figure in it. The core dataset is not testimony. It is the Indian state’s own paperwork, read back to it.

The ranks are the finding. This is not a list of privates:

By unit, the most-named formation is the same one the 2019 torture archive found: Rashtriya Rifles, 96 mentions, ahead of the BSF (70) and the CRPF (34). Two independent studies, seven years apart, using different methods and different case sets, arrive at the same regiment.^[5][6]

Across the 214 cases the report records 124 extra-judicial killings, 65 enforced disappearances, 59 instances of torture and 9 rapes (some cases involve more than one). Its conclusion on what the ranks imply:

The designations of some of these alleged perpetrators points to a deep institutional involvement of the Indian State in the crimes.

IPTK + APDP, Alleged Perpetrators, December 2012

And on why it names individuals rather than institutions:

rather than a general reference to, for example, the Rashtriya Rifles, names and ranks of officers of this counter-insurgency force are mentioned. This stems from the understanding that despite a culture of systemic impunity that exonerates perpetrators, it is individuals who commit violations, and they must first and foremost bear responsibility for their acts. By naming names the report seeks to remove the veil of anonymity and secrecy that has sustained impunity.

IPTK + APDP, Alleged Perpetrators, December 2012

The report is also candid about its own limits, which is why this site trusts it:

In a majority of cases crimes are not noted or investigated at all. Therefore, any listing or analysis of cases in this report would inevitably be an incomplete one.

IPTK + APDP, Alleged Perpetrators, December 2012

Five hundred named people, drawn from the state’s own records, including general officers. Fourteen years later, the number of prosecutions the Government of India has sanctioned remains the number at the top of this page.

What international law requires instead

India acceded to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1979. The duty to investigate credible allegations of unlawful killing and torture, and to prosecute where the evidence warrants, is not suspended by a domestic sanction requirement. A state cannot legislate itself out of an obligation it has accepted.

This is why the November 2025 UN statement did not merely deplore individual incidents. It urged India to bring its counter-terrorism laws and practices into line with its international human rights obligations and to “independently investigate all alleged violations and ensure accountability, including through prosecutions.”^[4]

Everything else in this dossier — the graves, the pellet blindings, the 432 torture cases, the fourfold gap between two casualty counts — is downstream of the fact that in thirty-six years nobody has had to answer for any of it in an ordinary court.