Towards a human rights compatible nuclear liability regime: some human rights reflections from India

Despite comprehensive measures to ensure the highest amount of safety in nuclear activities, the eventuality of nuclear accident will certainly be a human rights disaster, resulting in devastating damage to individuals, property and environment. The economic and social cost of the catastrophe depends on a range of factors - from loss of life to personal injury, to loss of freedom associated with the physical, emotional, mental dimensions, to damage and contamination of the land, to damage to other properties, to economic and other business losses, to damage to environment and to other socio-economic disturbances. This underlines the significance of the nuclear liability law to provide for the rules of liability and the prompt and adequate compensation to the victims in an expeditious manner so that human suffering can be minimised. It is in this context this paper introduces and examines the various attempts to establish international frameworks to deal with such issues and summarises the international law governing nuclear liability. However, the central focus of the paper is to describe the major contentious provisions of the law, which was recently introduced in India and to analyse its legal and constitutional implications with reference to the various tenets of fundamental rights. It positions the key issues of the proposed framework within the Indian human rights debate. This paper argues that the international community must rethink its response to future nuclear accidents so that a system of human-rights compatible international nuclear liability law can be realised.