14 August 2013. Stating that the usage of term “People’s War” in government’s directives regarding conflict victims’ identification card breaches provisions of Interim Constitution, the Supreme Court of Nepal (SC) on 12 August 2013 issued a stay order on distributing identification cards.
The joint bench of justices Kalyan Shrestha and Baidyanath Upadhyaya found that the terms used in “Identification Card Directives 2013” fail to represent conflict victims in a wider sense as alien terms not available in Article 33 of the Interim Constitution of Nepal 2007 have been used.
To identify conflict victims for providing different types of reliefs and compensations, the government had issued the directives. Conflict victims Suman Adhikari, Dev Bahadur Maharjan, Gyanendra Raj Aaran and others had petitioned to the court that the directives used terms like “People’s War” and Maoist victims like them would be kept out of relief and compensation packages while only one group would be made eligible to such packages because of it. Similarly, the term “Disappeared people” rather than “Victims of enforced disappearance” would facilitate relief and compensation for ineligible people, they had argued.
