Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee. India

Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee (CLMCI) is a leading Human Rights Organistaion of India based in Hyderabad.

CLMCI is a voice of the voiceless, and works for the cause of the protection of civil liberties and democratic rights of all the Human Beings.

Professor. Rehena Sulthana is the President of the Organization and Mr. Lateef Mohd Khan is the General Secretary.

CLMCI has been working for the past five years in Hyderabad. CLMCI is a civil liberties organization working against the Human rights violations of the general public and the minority community in particular. CLMCI have conducted several seminars, press and public meetings upholding the constitutional rights and democratic rights of people. Also, they conducted and participated in several Fact Finding Missions at state level and national level on extra judicial killings and police excesses. Thus we monitor in preserving and protecting the civil liberties by educating and advocating in the public and by filing petitions in the courts for the deserving people.

Fighting for Rights

Mr. Lateef Khan:
He was selected by the government as a school teacher, and has ever since then earned his living teaching high school children science.

His teachers’ union inducted Lateef into left liberal politics. He joined the AP Civil Liberties Committee with legendary human rights activists like Kannabiran and Balagopal, and took part in several of their fact-finding enquiries, mainly into fake encounter killings of alleged Naxalites. In the wake of the 2002 Gujarat carnage, the Gujarat police alleged terror links between men detained under POTA in Gujarat and covert terrorists in Hyderabad. The police in both States joined hands to detain Muslim youth from Andhra Pradesh. Lateef felt that many civil liberties organisations were hesitant to take up strongly the cause of these Muslim youth, because of allegations of their links with Pakistan’s ISI. He therefore established a fraternal civil liberties organisation, calling it the Civil Liberties Monitoring Committee, focussed specifically on the injustices faced by Muslims.

Lateef antagonised the police more and more as he fearlessly took them on in many ways. He petitioned for a CBI enquiry into the role of the Hyderabad police in the infamous encounter killings of Sohrabuddin and his wife Kauser, for which the Gujarat police was already indicted. He urged the High Court that murder charges be filed against police officials who had fired indiscriminately and unprovoked after the Mecca Masjid bomb explosions in 2007. When around 25 Muslim youth were illegally abducted and tortured by the police, he helped build a national coalition which used the courts and media to end further abductions. Most of the youth were released on bail as a direct result of these endeavours, and some have even been acquitted. With Teesta Setlavad and me, he also filed a suit for compensation by the police for the torture of the young men.

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