Unit 5: Domestic Enforcement of Human Rights
5.1 Status of Ratification of Human Rights Instruments
Nepal’s verified record: a party to the major instruments — seven of the nine core treaties (the Government’s own 2021 statement): the ICCPR and ICESCR (both 14 May 1991), CERD, CEDAW, CAT, CRC, and CRPD; the first South Asian state to accede to the CAT and the ICCPR’s Second Optional Protocol (the death penalty’s abolition); the specialised instruments (the ILO conventions, the disability-and-child faces); and the pending items — the ICRMW (Migrant Workers) and the CED (Enforced Disappearances) — the accessions on the agenda (check the current tables for the latest). The domestication: the Treaty Act 2047 — the ratified treaty’s force as law (and its primacy over inconsistent domestic law — the s.9 doctrine of the earlier semesters’ verified work); the reporting obligations’ machinery (the inter-ministerial coordination the NHRC studies note); the implementation gap’s honest audit (the ratification-rich, implementation-poor pattern).
5.2 Constitutional Framework
5.2.1 Fundamental Rights
The Constitution’s Part 3 (Articles 16–48 — the verified catalogue): the life-and-liberty core (Arts 16–22: the criminal-justice guarantees including the fair trial and the habeas corpus’s non-suspendable floor); the equality architecture (Art 18 — the non-discrimination grounds including caste, disability, sexual orientation, and the special-provision proviso); the freedoms (expression, assembly, association, movement — the pandemic-era lessons); the social rights as justiciable rights (the Nepali design’s distinction: education, health, food, housing, clean environment, employment, social security — Arts 30–44 — the ESCR’s constitutional hardening); the remedies (Art 46 — the right to constitutional remedy; Arts 133/144 — the writ jurisdiction). The FRs’ character: directly enforceable, immediately binding (the progressive realization’s constitutional answer).
5.2.2 Directive Principles and Policy
Part 4 (Arts 50–52): the state’s goals-and-policies — the political, economic, social and international directions (the foreign-policy clause of Art 51(13) — the verified UN-Charter-and-Panchsheel anchor); the non-justiciability clause (Art 52)
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