Military Justice Principles signed at Commonwealth Secretariat Conference; ASG Aishwarya Bhati, Navdeep Singh among signatories

The Commonwealth Secretariat on Tuesday released the “Commonwealth Military Justice Principles” signed on November 7 at Stellenbosch in South Africa. .The principles fill a major vacuum with regard to military justice by enunciating the basic minimum requirements for military justice, as followed by most democracies for the regular judicial and legal systems. Among the signatories are Indian lawyers, Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Aishwarya Bhati and advocate Navdeep Singh..The Commonwealth is an international body comprising 56 nations - most of them former territories of the British Empire - that promotes democracy, good governance, peace and the rule of law.A five-member global advisory committee was constituted by the Commonwealth Secretariat earlier this year and a global consultation group was thereafter constituted on the recommendations of the advisory committee.The members of the committee were advocate Navdeep Singh, Judge Alan Large of the United Kingdom, Chief Judge Kevin Riordan of New Zealand, Dr Michelle Nel, Vice Dean of University of Stellenbosch from South Africa and Professor Eugene Fidell of the Yale University, USA.The consultation group comprised ten members including ASG Bhati.The principles were drafted and signed by all fifteen members as a “committee of experts”.The document comprises ten basic principles outlining the bare minimum expectations from any system of military justice, including adherence to the principles of separation of powers, rule of law, impartiality, independence and competence of adjudicators and prosecution, rights of the accused, open-access and appellate rights..ASG Bhati has extensively dealt with military related issues in the past and represented the petitioners in the landmark judgments which authorised ‘permanent commission’ to women officers of the armed forces. She has also fought for women’s rights, children’s rights, rights of persons with disabilities and has been a crusader in anti-tobacco litigation. .Navdeep Singh is a Chandigarh-based lawyer at the Punjab and Haryana High Court who specialises in constitutional and service matters. He was member of the High-Level Committee of Experts constituted by the Defence Minister on directions of the Prime Minister in 2015 to reduce litigation initiated by the Ministry of Defence and to strengthen the system of redressal of grievances.He is a former Territorial Army (TA) volunteer-reservist and was the founder President of the Armed Forces Tribunal Bar Association. He was also a part of the Yale Draft and is an International Fellow with the National Institute of Military Justice, Washington DC, and Member of the International Society for Military Law and the Law of War, Brussels..Bhati and Singh have in the past worked together on issues related to service jurisprudence, tribunalisation and the military.Bhati had also contributed a chapter on women in the military for the international book “March to Justice: Global Military Law Landmarks” edited by Singh..[Read The Stellenbosch Draft]