Henri Tiphagne

Co-founder

Photo: Wikimedia (CC BY-SA)

Henri Tiphagne is the co-founder of People's Watch (1995)[1], an Indian non-profit working on human rights from Madurai.

Henri Tiphagne is an Indian lawyer and human rights defender based in Madurai, Tamil Nadu. He is a founder and the executive director of People's Watch, a human rights organisation that monitors and documents violations, provides legal representation to victims and runs human rights education programmes.

People's Watch began in 1995 as a programme unit of the Centre for Promotion of Social Concerns in Madurai. It initially worked across Tamil Nadu and extended its work to other Indian states from 2006. Tiphagne practises in the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court and has worked principally on torture, custodial violence, caste discrimination and the protection of human rights defenders.

Early life and education

Tiphagne has described three influences on his decision to take up human rights work: his mother's long career working among people affected by leprosy, his involvement in the All India Catholic University Federation student movement, and relief work in flood-affected parts of Tamil Nadu. Organising among landless labourers brought him into contact with policing practices and led him to study law.

Career

People's Watch was established on 10 December 1995. Its early years were given over to systematic monitoring of human rights violations in Tamil Nadu; from 1998 it added legal intervention on behalf of victims, and from the late 1990s it began human rights education in schools, a programme that later reached several hundred schools in the state. From 2006 the organisation worked in a number of states beyond Tamil Nadu on torture prevention, Dalit rights and the protection of defenders.

The organisation's licence to receive foreign contributions was suspended by the Indian government in 2012 and restored by order of the Delhi High Court in 2014; renewal was refused in 2016. Tiphagne has been a prominent critic of the use of the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act against civil society organisations.

Tiphagne convenes the Working Group on Human Rights in India and the UN, and has served as chairperson of the Asian Forum for Human Rights and Development (FORUM-ASIA), to which he was appointed in 2012. He has also served on the executive committees of the World Organisation Against Torture and the International Dalit Solidarity Network, and is national secretary of the Human Rights Defenders' Alert - India.

Recognition

In 2016 Tiphagne received the eighth Human Rights Award of Amnesty International Germany, becoming the first Indian to be given the award. It was presented at the Maxim Gorki Theatre in Berlin on 25 April 2016 and carried a prize of 10,000 euros.[2][3][4][5]

People's Watch

People's Watch, founded in Madurai in 1995, monitors human rights violations, provides legal aid to victims of torture and caste violence, and runs national human rights education programmes. It has intervened in cases across Tamil Nadu and India and led a National Project on Preventing Torture.

People's Watch reports the following, on its own site:

Post tsunami relief and rehabilitation activities providing relief to 20,000 families, mostly dalits affected by tsunami.
Launching of National Project on Preventing Torture in 10 states across India (2006).