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In this post, I will discuss how taxation of tampons may constitute gender discrimination and possibly amount to a human rights violation. I will also be discussing how disparate treatment in taxation is made visible in this situation and why choices made in taxation policy have significance outside of simple revenue collection

The United States has much to learn from India, including lessons about the relationship between taxation and gender equity. In June, 2018, India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) Council agreed to eliminate the 12 percent tax imposed on menstrual hygiene products such as sanitary pads and tampons.

The introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (‘GST’) regime is a watershed event in the history of indirect taxation in India. This has been facilitated by many important changes in the Constitution of India. The power to levy GST flows directly from newly introduced Article 246A of the Constitution.

Of late, the transformative nature and potential of the Indian Constitution has been placed under the spotlight thanks to attention from both scholars and courts. The contours of this argument are contested, but according to most versions, the Constitution is an instrument designed to realise an India where the ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity are fully expressed and protected against arbitrary deprivation.

An important argument of the Petitioner revolved around how the impugned provisions violated the fundamental right to privacy under Article 21 by interfering with the right to voluntary, consensual sexual intercourse between adults. This submission proceeded in three steps – first, the constitution guarantees a right to privacy

The judgment of the Supreme Court in Joseph Shine v. Union of India striking down Section 497 of the Indian Penal Code and Section 198(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure is monumental for reasons more than one. Rarely has the Court, in its institutional history, struck down a definitional provision of the Penal Code.

In this third, and final, part to the series on the Anti-Trafficking Bill, 2018, I address three concerns. The first, a critique of the ‘raid, rescue and rehabilitate’ model used by the Bill. The second, I discuss the ignorance of the Bill towards the rights of and impact on the victims of trafficking. Finally, I discuss the improper way in which the Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha.

In this second part of the series on the Anti-Trafficking Bill, 2018, I shall deal exclusively with how the Bill departs from the core principles of Criminal Law and falls short of providing safeguards. The Bill introduces numerous other offences (Sections 33 to 45) and relies heavily on criminal law. However, it does so without many of the substantive and procedural safeguards that are integral to criminal law systems around the world,

The political economy of Indian criminal law is fast changing. Even as Section 377 of the IPC on sodomy and Section 497 on adultery have been read down to further the equality of LGBT persons and women, new forms of carcerality that threaten to marginalise the most vulnerable groups of society take shape.