Shillong, Dec 09: The Thma-U-Rangli-Juki (TUR) holds a ‘street corner meeting’ to protest against the draconian Meghalaya Preventive Detention Act (MPDA) and Meghalaya Maintenance of Public Order Act (MMPO) laws and also observe the International Human Rights Day at Khyndai Lad.
The organisation demanded repealing the Meghalaya Preventive Detention Act (MPDA) and Meghalaya Maintenance Public Order (MMPO), two laws under which many pressure group leaders have been booked in last three months.
TUR leader Angela Rangad said that the street corner meeting is the state wide campaign against attacks on people’s right to protest and expose the blatant misuse of these black laws by what the TUR says a corrupt and authoritarian state government to silent any form of dissent and the government’s constant illegal infringement on the civil and political liberties of the people of the state. Rangad felt that the existence of laws like the MPDA and MMPO has slowly and silently ‘eroded’ the legal procedures and constrained ‘democratic spaces’ by curbing the individual and collective expression of dissent..
Speaking to media persons, TUR leader Angela Rangad accused the State Government of misusing and abusing the Acts in the state even as she asserted that the two Acts takes away the people right to oppose.
According to Rangad, he said the due process of law has to be followed and even criminals has the right to proper process of law and to trial but the police impose MPDA even on car theft accused persons.
“If TADA can be removed why not MPDA,” she said.
Rangad said laws like MPDA and MMPO are laws that have institutionalized human rights ‘violations’. She said “It is necessary to protect people’s rights, she maintains that the laws like MPDA and MMPO should be repealed in the state of Meghalaya.”
She was of the opinion that if International Human Rights Day has to have any meaning in Meghalaya people have to start challenging these legal cultures of ‘rights violation’. She asserted, “Even criminals have rights proper process of Law, proper process of trail and one cannot deny them from that.”
Recently, a total of seventy-one pro Inner-Line Permit (ILP) activists were arrested and booked under MMPO and some under the MPDA for their alleged involvement in the several cases related to arsons during the three months agitations demanding for implementation of the ILP to check influx in the state.(SP News)
