Indian Constitution, Social Justice, Human Rights and Social Work Practice II: The Concept and History of Human Rights, Declarations, Treaties and Protection Systems, Human Rights in India, the Human Rights Perspective in Social Work with Ethnic-Sensitive and Feminist Practice, and Work with Victims of Violations, UNHCR, the NHRC and International Agencies

A declaration sets out principles and is not in itself legally binding; a treaty or convention binds the states that ratify or accede to it. The Universal Declaration was followed by the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both adopted in 1966 and in force in 1976; India acceded to both in 1979. Together with the Declaration and the optional protocols, they form the International Bill of Human Rights. Other core treaties address particular groups and violations, and the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (1993), adopted at the World Conference on Human Rights, reaffirmed the universality and indivisibility of rights and led to the creation of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights later that year.

Human rights protection systems operate at several levels. The United Nations' Charter-based system includes the Human Rights Council, established in 2006 to replace the Commission on Human Rights (1946), with 47 member states; its Universal Periodic Review, under which every UN member state's record is reviewed in turn; and its special procedures, independent special rapporteurs and working groups on themes and countries. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, created in 1993, leads the UN's human rights work. The treaty-based system consists of committees of independent experts, such as the Human Rights Committee for the ICCPR and the Committee on the Rights of the Child, which examine state reports and, where states accept it, individual complaints. Regional systems include the European Convention on Human Rights (1950) with its court, the American Convention (1969) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (1981). The International Criminal Court, under the Rome Statute of 1998, tries individuals for genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes; India is not a party.

In India, human rights are protected primarily through the fundamental rights of the Constitution, enforced by the Supreme Court and High Courts, and through the directive principles, many of which the courts have read into the right to life. The Protection of Human Rights Act 1993 defines human rights as the rights relating to life, liberty, equality and dignity of the individual guaranteed by the Constitution or embodied in the international covenants and enforceable by Indian courts. It set up the National Human Rights Commission, constituted on 12 October 1993, and State Human Rights Commissions, and provided for human rights courts in districts. After the 2019 amendment, the NHRC's chairperson may be a former Chief Justice of India or a former judge of the Supreme Court. The Commission inquires into complaints of violations or negligence by public servants, intervenes in court proceedings, visits prisons and other institutions, reviews laws and promotes human rights awareness and research; it recommends rather than enforces, and it generally cannot take up matters more than a year old.

The major human rights concerns in India that social workers meet include custodial torture and deaths, caste-based atrocities and discrimination, violence against women and children, bonded labour and trafficking, manual scavenging (prohibited by the Prohibition of Employment as Manual Scavengers and their Rehabilitation Act 2013), displacement by development projects, the rights of prisoners and undertrials, communal violence, conditions in institutions such as psychiatric hospitals and children's homes, and the rights of refugees and stateless persons. India is not a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol and has no national refugee law; refugees are dealt with through executive decisions and the Foreigners Act 1946, while the UNHCR registers asylum seekers from some countries through its office in New Delhi.

Social work has been described as a human rights profession. The Global Definition (2014) places human rights among its central principles, the IFSW–IASSW Statement of Ethical Principles (2018) requires social workers to promote human rights and challenge violations, and the United Nations Centre for Human Rights, with the IFSW and IASSW, published a manual on human rights and social work in 1994. A human rights perspective in practice treats clients as rights-holders rather than beneficiaries of charity, and the state and others as duty-bearers; it attends to the process as well as the outcome of help. Its principles are often summarised by the acronym PANEL: participation, accountability, non-discrimination and equality, empowerment, and legality (linking practice to legal rights). In casework this means informing clients of their entitlements and helping them claim them; in community work, building people's capacity to demand accountability; and in policy work, measuring programmes against rights standards.

Ethnic-sensitive practice, set out by Wynetta Devore and Elfriede Schlesinger in Ethnic-Sensitive Social Work Practice (1981), holds that practice must take account of clients' ethnic reality, the way ethnicity and social class together (Milton Gordon's "ethclass") shape their experiences, problems, help-seeking and response to services, and that workers must be aware of their own ethnic identity and assumptions. Related ideas are cultural competence, the knowledge and skills to work across cultures, and cultural humility, a lifelong self-critical stance that recognises the client as the expert on their own culture. In India the equivalent sensitivities concern caste, religion, tribe, language and region. Feminist practice, developed by writers such as Lena Dominelli and Eileen McLeod (Feminist Social Work, 1989), starts from the principle that the personal is political; it analyses how gender power shapes women's problems, seeks an egalitarian relationship between worker and client, uses consciousness-raising and groups, validates women's experience, and works for structural change as well as individual support. Work with diverse groups, persons with disabilities, sexual and gender minorities, religious minorities, migrants, indigenous peoples and older persons, applies the same logic: understand the specific forms of disadvantage and discrimination each faces, avoid treating difference as deficit, and work with the group's own organisations.

Social work with victims of human rights violations, survivors of torture and custodial violence, trafficking, communal and caste violence, forced displacement and war, combines immediate safety and medical care, psychosocial support using trauma-informed approaches that avoid re-traumatisation, documentation of the violation for legal purposes, legal aid, compensation and rehabilitation, and reintegration with family and community. Human rights activism includes monitoring and fact-finding, reporting to national and international bodies, strategic litigation, campaigns and advocacy, and support to human rights defenders, whose protection the UN Declaration on Human Rights Defenders (1998) affirms. The social worker's code requires both: help for the person harmed and action against the conditions that harmed them.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was established by the General Assembly in December 1950 and began work in January 1951, with headquarters in Geneva; it has twice received the Nobel Peace Prize (1954 and 1981). Its mandate is to protect refugees, asylum seekers and stateless persons and, at the request of the UN, internally displaced persons, and to find durable solutions: voluntary repatriation, local integration in the country of asylum, and resettlement in a third country. The cornerstone of refugee protection is non-refoulement, the principle in Article 33 of the 1951 Convention that no refugee shall be returned to a territory where their life or freedom would be threatened. International non-governmental agencies include the International Committee of the Red Cross (1863, the guardian of international humanitarian law), Amnesty International (founded in 1961 by Peter Benenson; Nobel Peace Prize 1977), Human Rights Watch (begun as Helsinki Watch in 1978) and the International Commission of Jurists; UN agencies such as UNICEF, the ILO and UN Women also work on specific rights.