Kumar ’17 LLM Discusses Experience as Bernstein Human Rights Fellow

Sanya Kumar ’17 LLM is completing her Bernstein International Human Rights Fellowship at Reprieve, an international human rights organization that works to abolish the death penalty or restrict its use worldwide. At the Law School, Sanya was an Inlaks Scholar and a Lillian Goldman Perpetual Scholar. She was part of the Lowenstein Clinic and worked with the Capital Assistance Project and the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism. Before coming to Yale, Sanya received her law degree from National Law University, Delhi, where she was a Senior Student Fellow at the Centre for Constitutional Law, Policy, and Governance. During this time, she was also actively involved in various law reform initiatives. She was a research assistant for the 262nd Report of the Law Commission of India on the Death Penalty and assisted the Commission with a project involving review of the criminal justice system. She also worked with the Government of NCT of Delhi on issues relating to amendments to rape laws and juvenile justice legislations.

In an interview with the Schell Center, Sanya discusses her experience thus far at Reprieve and shares her excitement for the 20th Anniversary Bernstein Symposium, which will take place April 12–13, 2018.

Why did you choose to do your Bernstein Fellowship at Reprieve? What makes the death penalty an important issue to you, and what makes Reprieve’s approach or focus unique?

I began working on projects related to the death penalty several years ago, when I was at law school in India. Interviewing death row convicts and their family members and participating in other projects that involved empirically analyzing the capital jurisprudence in the country revealed the disparate treatment meted out to marginalized groups in the criminal justice system. The arbitrary imposition of this irreversible punishment in such a fragile and imperfect system, and the everyday uncertainty about a person’s life left me quite disenchanted with the law, but it also drew me closer to the issue.

Before coming to Yale, my death penalty work had a domestic focus, but I often wondered about the heightened vulnerability of those facing the death sentence abroad. When inmates find it so hard to meet their family members or get lawyers, and had so many issues accessing justice in their own countries, what would be the experiences of people facing the death sentence in a foreign country?

My work on death penalty issues in India, then at Yale Law School, drew me towards Reprieve. I have followed Reprieve’s work and was aware of their expertise in supporting foreign nationals facing the death sentence abroad, as well as the impact of their work in the Middle East and North Africa region. With their access to local organizations, and success in adopting a multi-pronged strategy of engaging with lawmakers, policy makers, and corporates while pursuing cases of strategic significance in courts, I believed that Reprieve was uniquely positioned to support this project.

What projects are you working on as a Bernstein Fellow?

At Reprieve, I work on casework and advocacy initiatives aimed at restricting the use of the death penalty in South Asia and the Middle East and North Africa.

My Bernstein project centers around South Asian migrant workers employed in the Gulf States who are facing the death penalty. It seeks to address systemic barriers migrant workers face in accessing the legal system and devise a rights-based strategy to restrict the use of death penalty and ensure better compliance with human rights obligations. The work indicates that a disproportionate number of male migrant workers are sentenced to death for drug trafficking—there are indicators that many of them were vulnerable individuals who were coerced into trafficking drugs and may have been victims of human trafficking. It also appears that female migrant workers face the death sentence for having murdered their employers under deeply abusive conditions that may amount to forced labor.

Over the last few months, I have been working to document the number, charges, and conditions of migrant workers facing the death sentence in the Gulf States. I have also been working to identify gaps in domestic frameworks of sending and receiving countries, international law protections, and defenses that are available to migrant workers facing the death sentence. To this end, Reprieve made a submission to the Human Rights Committee on the Draft General Comment on Article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which enshrines the right to life. The submission highlighted the nexus between human trafficking practices, the exploitation of persons as forced drug mules and the application of death penalty for drug offences. It urges the Human Rights Committee to acknowledge this nexus and urge member States to incorporate the relevant guarantees in their domestic frameworks to ensure that migrant workers who are compelled to commit crimes related to their status as a trafficked person are not punished for the same.

In addition to my Bernstein Project, I have assisted on Reprieve’s work in Pakistan and in the Maldives. I have also been helping with Reprieve’s Stop Lethal Injection Project, which helps pharmaceutical manufacturers, distributors, investors and regulators prevent the misuse of their medicines—which are not designed to cause bodily harm—in lethal injection execution. This is vital work, due to which the overwhelming majority of states are unable to source drugs for use in executions, preventing all but a handful of America’s 31 executing states from putting prisoners to death. This contributed to bringing death sentences and executions last year down to their second-lowest rate in the past 25 years in the United States.

What do you think will come out of this and other advocacy work you have been involved in?

If the Human Rights Committee adopts our submission in their resolution, then there will exist another piece of soft law that can be used in engagement with governments on the death penalty, trafficking, and other related issues. This would be useful in urging UN member states to ensure that their domestic frameworks are in compliance with international standards.

Reprieve also made a submission for UN universal periodic review process for the United Arab Emirates. Our advocacy work contributed to the UK government making recommendations to the UAE to comply with international minimum standards in imposition of the death penalty, and improve and expand identification and protection for victims of human trafficking and forced labor. Likewise, a couple of weeks ago, Reprieve made a submission to Saudi Arabia’s universal periodic review process, drawing attention to the use of death penalty for drug offences, and forced labor and human trafficking issues in the country, primarily as they relate to migrant workers.

Submissions like the ones we have made to the Human Rights Committee and other UN bodies are a way to draw attention to these issues on the international stage, and to make changes that are responsive to the situations migrant workers find themselves in.

What challenges have you faced so far in your work, and what have you learned from those challenges?

A significant challenge has been the complete dearth of information on the number and conditions of migrant workers facing the death penalty, and the lack of transparency around how capital trials are conducted. The lack of information exists in both the South Asian sending states and the receiving Gulf States. In most countries, it is also difficult to carry out field investigations – to get access to prisons or even connect with families of people facing the death sentence. To try and navigate this, we filed numerous applications to obtain this data and argued that the information should be released in public interest.

Pretty early on in law school, we learn about the promise of the law. However, as we are exposed to the working of the criminal justice system, we realize there is a gap between the theory and practice of law. Being in this space for the last six months has taught me a lot about how you work with the protections that already exist to try and fulfill law’s objective, while at the same time, you push stakeholders towards creating a more progressive system.

How has your work in the Lowenstein Clinic influenced your work at Reprieve?

My time at the Clinic equipped me with skills that are needed to carry out a lot of my tasks. From conducting human rights research, to writing briefs and submissions to collaborating with diverse stakeholders, and brainstorming different advocacy initiatives, I have felt more prepared because of the training I received in the Clinic. The Clinic also provides a strong knowledge base in human rights principles and comparative law and enables you to creatively apply these to serve the client’s best interests. This has been helpful in my project, which involves multiple jurisdictions, and where I have to navigate many intersecting human rights issues and identify protections available for migrant workers, while also recognizing the gaps that exist in international and domestic law.

Most of all, the Clinic teaches you how to work in teams. It taught me how to brainstorm ideas and roadblocks as a team. The Clinic also gave me valuable lessons in how to care for yourself while conducting human rights advocacy, so that you can do the work sustainably, which has proved to very important.

What’s one thing you’re looking forward to about the Bernstein Symposium?

I’m looking forward to learning about the work and the experiences of the other fellows and getting their thoughts on the issues I’ve encountered in my work. I’m also excited to connect with returning fellows who have been in this field and learning about the directions they took after they completed their fellowships. Lastly, I’m very excited to be coming back to the Law School, and meeting my professors, friends, and folks in Graduate Programs!