LLM Group 4 Human Rights Law Protection and Enforcements of Human Rights 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

While some fundamental rights are available only to citizens, others like Article 14 and Article 21 are available to all persons, whether citizens or foreigners." Discuss this statement in the light of Chairman, Railway Board v. Chandrima Das, (2000) 2 SCC 465 case in India.

For full marks, cover: the quotation is taken from the judgment the question names, so the case is not an illustration to be added at the end. It is the subject. Set out its facts, the three separate arguments the Railways ran and the answer to each, because the case decides three distinct points and most scripts notice only one. Then do what the quotation asks: show which fundamental rights are confined to citizens and which are not, and why the drafting distinction between "citizen" and "person" carries that consequence. Finish with the wider proposition, that the Universal Declaration operates in Indian law as a rule of construction rather than as enforceable law, and show the line of cases in which it has done so.

The three arguments and the three answers

First, that the victim was a foreign national and could not claim a fundamental right. The Supreme Court rejected this on the text. The rights in Part III are of two kinds. Some are conferred on CITIZENS: Article 15 on discrimination, Article 16 on equality of opportunity in public employment, Article 19 on the six freedoms, Article 29 on the protection of the interests of minorities and Article 30 on their right to establish educational institutions. Others are conferred on any PERSON: Article 14 on equality before the law and equal protection of the laws, Article 20 on protection in respect of conviction for offences, Article 21 on protection of life and personal liberty, Article 22 on protection against arrest and detention, Article 23 on the prohibition of traffic in human beings and forced labour, Article 25 on freedom of conscience and Article 27 on freedom from taxation for promotion of a religion. The Court held that since Article 21 speaks of "person" and not of "citizen", its protection extends to everyone within the territory, citizen or foreigner, and that the State is under an obligation to protect the life and liberty of every human being.

The reasoning on the Declaration. In arriving at this, the Court said in terms that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been recognised as the model code of conduct adopted by the General Assembly and that the fundamental rights guaranteed by our Constitution are almost in consonance with the rights contained in it. It located the right to life as including the right to live with human dignity, and treated rape as a violation of that right rather than merely as an offence against the person.

Why the drafting distinction exists at all

The Constituent Assembly did not confer the Article 19 freedoms on foreigners for reasons of State: a right to move freely throughout the territory, to reside and settle anywhere and to carry on any occupation could not be given to every person present in India without displacing immigration and foreign exchange control altogether.

The Declaration as a rule of construction, before and after Chandrima Das

India is a dualist State and a treaty does not of itself become enforceable municipal law. What Indian courts have done instead is use international instruments to construe the constitutional text, and the line is continuous.

Vishaka v. State of Rajasthan, (1997) 6 SCC 241, took the technique to its furthest point. A social worker had been gang raped in Rajasthan for attempting to prevent a child marriage, and there was no law on sexual harassment at the workplace. The Supreme Court held that in the absence of domestic law occupying the field, international conventions and norms are to be READ INTO the fundamental rights guaranteed by Articles 14, 15, 19(1)(g) and 21 to enlarge their meaning and content, and, drawing on the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, 1979, laid down binding guidelines that governed until the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013.

Chandrima Das completed the sequence by attaching money to it. Where Jolly George Varghese construed a statute and Vishaka supplied a rule, Chandrima Das awarded rupees ten lakh to a non citizen on the footing that the Declaration is the model code and Article 21 says "person".

What the case does not decide

Three limits should be stated, because an answer that treats Chandrima Das as making the Declaration enforceable is wrong.

National Human Rights Commission v. State of Arunachal Pradesh, (1996) 1 SCC 742, decided four years earlier, had already applied the same reasoning to a group. Some sixty five thousand Chakmas, displaced from what was then East Pakistan by the Kaptai hydel project in 1964, faced quit notices and an economic blockade from a students' union. The Supreme Court held that the State is bound under Article 21 to protect the life and liberty of every human being, citizen or not, directed the State to protect them and to forward their citizenship applications to the Central Government, and made clear that it could not permit a private body to drive them out. It is the collective counterpart of Chandrima Das.

Mohammad Salimullah v. Union of India, an interim order of the Supreme Court in April 2021, marks the limit precisely. Rohingya refugees registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees sought to restrain the deportation of about a hundred and fifty detained at Jammu. The Court declined the substantive relief. It accepted that the rights under Articles 14 and 21 are available to all persons, and held that the right NOT TO BE DEPORTED is ancillary or concomitant to the right to reside and settle in India under Article 19(1)(e), which is conferred on citizens alone. It directed only that the Rohingya at Jammu not be deported unless the prescribed procedure was followed.

Conclusion. The statement in the question is an accurate summary of Chairman, Railway Board v. Chandrima Das, (2000) 2 SCC 465, and the case supports every limb of it. The Universal Declaration operates in Indian law as a model code with which the fundamental rights are in consonance, which means it is a powerful aid to construction and not a source of enforceable obligation. The division between rights given to citizens and rights given to all persons is a matter of the drafting: Articles 15, 16, 19, 29 and 30 say "citizen" and Articles 14, 20, 21, 22, 23, 25 and 27 say "person", and Hans Muller confirms that the difference is real, because a foreigner protected by Article 21 while here may still be expelled under the Foreigners Act, 1946. What makes Chandrima Das the leading authority is that it decided three things at once and gave a remedy for all of them: a Bangladeshi woman could invoke Article 21, the Union was answerable for the acts of railway employees in the course of a commercial undertaking, and compensation of rupees ten lakh could be awarded in a writ petition as a public law remedy. Read with Jolly George Varghese and Vishaka, it shows the whole Indian method of receiving international human rights law: not by incorporation, but by construction, and with money attached at the end.