ABSTRACT
Until the mid-1990s, few human rights lawyers or activists outside South Asia were aware of caste discrimination, its nature or extent. The issue was conspicuous in international human rights law discourse only by its absence, while governments of South Asian states, where such discrimination occurred, treated it as a strictly internal social-cultural matter. From the early 1980s, frustration with the limited success of domestic measures to combat persistent and widespread caste-based discrimination and anti-Dalit violence led Dalit activists in India and the diaspora to turn to international NGOs and the UN human rights treaty bodies and charter mechanisms for an international response to caste discrimination as a human rights issue. 1 Of the UN bodies and mechanisms with which Dalit activists sought to engage, two were at the forefront of UN activity: the former UN Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights 2 and the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), 3 the monitoring body of the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination 1965 (ICERD). 4 Of these, CERD has played a crucial role in the international recognition of caste discrimination as a human rights issue and as an international human rights treaty violation. This chapter examines the international legal framework for caste discrimination as it has developed under the UN human rights treaty regime, in particular under ICERD and its monitoring body, CERD. Chapter 5 will examine how caste discrimination has been addressed by the UN charter bodies and procedures.
