LLM Group 4 Human Rights Law Human Rights and International Order 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

It is ENTRENCHED, which means it is harder to change than ordinary law. Article 368 of the Constitution of India requires a special majority for an amendment, and for entries touching the federal structure a ratification by half the State legislatures. Since Kesavananda Bharati v. State of Kerala, (1973) 4 SCC 225, it is entrenched further still, because the basic structure doctrine places some of it beyond amendment altogether.

It is JUSTICIABLE, which means a court may test a law against it and refuse to apply the law. Article 13(2) of the Constitution says the State shall not make any law which takes away or abridges the rights conferred by Part III and that any law made in contravention shall, to the extent of the contravention, be void. That single sentence is what converts a declaration into a bill.

It carries a REMEDY. Article 32 makes the right to move the Supreme Court for enforcement of Part III itself a fundamental right, which Ambedkar called the very soul of the Constitution and the very heart of it. A right with no forum is a preamble.

The Indian bill as a worked example

Part III is unusually detailed and its architecture repays attention. Articles 14 to 18 carry equality, Articles 19 to 22 the freedoms and the guarantees in criminal matters, Articles 23 and 24 the right against exploitation, Articles 25 to 28 religion, Articles 29 and 30 the cultural and educational rights of minorities, and Article 32 the remedy.

Two features are worth naming. First, the rights are not absolute: Article 19(2) to (6) permit reasonable restrictions on stated grounds, and the test of reasonableness is judicial. Second, several rights bind private persons and not only the State. Article 15(2) forbids a private shop, hotel or well from excluding a citizen on grounds of religion, race, caste or sex; Article 17 abolishes untouchability; Article 23 forbids traffic in human beings and forced labour. A bill of rights that operates horizontally is comparatively rare and is a direct response to the Indian social order.

Emergency. Every bill of rights has a suspension clause and every suspension clause is where the bill is most likely to fail. Indian experience is the sharpest illustration available anywhere. In ADM Jabalpur v. Shivkant Shukla, (1976) 2 SCC 521, a majority held during the Emergency that on a Presidential order under Article 359 suspending Article 21, no person had locus standi to move a High Court under Article 226 for habeas corpus, even on a plea that the detention was without authority of law. Khanna J. dissented, holding that the State has no power to deprive a person of life or liberty without authority of law even in an emergency. Parliament corrected the position by the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1978, which amended Article 359 so that Articles 20 and 21 can never be suspended, and Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 SCC 1, formally overruled ADM Jabalpur. The lesson is that entrenchment protected nothing; the text had to be changed and a later court had to say the earlier one was wrong.

The gap between declaration and delivery. A right to education declared in Article 21A in 2002 and implemented by the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act, 2009 still depends on schools, teachers and transport. A bill of rights can compel a State to stop doing something far more reliably than it can compel it to do something.

Consent and reservation. The international bill binds only those who join, and those who join may exclude. The compatibility test is the object and purpose test of the International Court of Justice in its Advisory Opinion on Reservations to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1951 ICJ Reports 15, now Article 19(c) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, 1969. Nobody has the last word on whether a given reservation passes it. The Human Rights Committee claimed that authority in General Comment No. 24 of 1994, asserting that an invalid reservation is severable, and several States rejected the claim outright.

No court of general jurisdiction. The International Court of Justice hears disputes between States, not individual complaints. The individual mechanisms are optional: India has ratified both Covenants and not the First Optional Protocol, so no individual in India may petition the Human Rights Committee.

The bridge that actually works. Where the international bill has real effect in a domestic system, it is because a domestic court chose to import it. Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, (1997) 6 SCC 241, held that in the absence of domestic law, international conventions and norms are to be read into the fundamental rights to enlarge their meaning and content, and used the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979 to lay down binding guidelines against sexual harassment at the workplace which governed until the 2013 Act. Chairman, Railway Board v. Chandrima Das, (2000) 2 SCC 465, treated the Universal Declaration as a model code and awarded rupees ten lakh to a Bangladeshi national gang raped on railway premises, holding that Article 21 protects any person and not only a citizen.

The regional bill, which is the only form that has closed the gap

Between the domestic bill and the global one sits a third form that the question's phrase "global context" should not be allowed to hide. A regional bill of rights can have a court whose judgments bind, and where it does, the three defining features reappear at the international level.

Conclusion. A Bill of Rights is defined by three features and not by its contents: entrenchment, justiciability and a remedy. The Indian Part III has all three, which is why Article 13(2) can void a statute and Article 32 can award compensation, and why the Forty-fourth Amendment of 1978 had to be passed to put Articles 20 and 21 beyond suspension after ADM Jabalpur. The International Bill of Human Rights has none of the three. It cannot be entrenched because a State may decline to ratify, it cannot invalidate national law, and its remedies are views rather than orders. The consequence is that the global challenge is not the same as the domestic one: at home the difficulties are counter majoritarian legitimacy, emergency and access, while internationally they are consent, reservation and the absence of a forum. What closes the gap is not international machinery but domestic absorption, and the Indian record shows exactly how it happens, through Vishaka reading a convention into Articles 14, 15, 19(1)(g) and 21 and Chandrima Das treating the Declaration as a model code with a price attached.