Valley
CIEDP extends time for filing cases
The Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) has extended the deadline by one month to register complaints related to conflict-era cases as they continue to pour in.Dewan Rai
The Commission of Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) has extended the deadline by one month to register complaints related to conflict-era cases as they continue to pour in.
The commission started registering complaints from conflict victims in mid-April. As the two-month window closing on June 16 appears to be inadequate, the commission announced the deadline extension hoping for more complaints.
The commission has received 2,084 cases as of Sunday. The number of complaints is more than the number of incidents of disappearance—1,495—registered by the Peace Ministry.
Mahesh Sharma Poudel, secretary at the CIEDP, however, said complaints received up to six months before the end of the commission’s tenure would be looked into.
The Conflict Victims Common Platform had concluded after monitoring the situation in 45 districts that the commissions should extend the deadline for case registration. The monitoring report claims that victims in rural areas were not informed about the process.
The transitional justice bodies—CIEDP and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission—have a two-year mandate with possible one-year extension to look into criminal cases from the decade-long Maoist insurgency. The remaining eight months of the commissions’ tenure seem inadequate to investigate more than 14,000 extrajudicial killings, 1,400 incidents of enforced disappearance and thousands of cases of torture, internal displacement and disability.
The TRC has got 25,120 cases as of Sunday. It has distributed 30,528 complaint registration forms. “We have not decided about extending our deadline for case registration,” said Surya Kiran Gurung, the TRC chairman. “We will take a decision after studying feedback from officials and commissioners monitoring the process in several districts.”
Gurung said the rate of compliant registration has increased significantly as the deadline draws to its close. Sunday alone saw the registration of a record 1,473 cases.