In its listing of the one hundred most influential human beings of 2019, TIME mag has included two Indian girls attorneys — Menaka Guruswamy and Arundhati Katju — who spearheaded the felony undertaking to strike down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code.
The list additionally includes Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani.
Katju and Guruswamy represented the petitioners in opposition to the ban on consensual homosexual sex in the country. The duo highlighted folks who suffered under the law by enlisting more than a dozen gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender individuals as co-petitioners. They contested that people risked arrest for publicly identifying themselves as part of the LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer) community.
Katju is the niece of former Supreme Court decides Markandey Katju. She was additionally a junior below senior advised by Sidharth Luthra inside the Supreme Court.
Guruswamy is the daughter of Mohan Guruswamy, a famous political thinker, an adviser to former Prime Minister past due to Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
US President Donald Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Pope Francis, golfer Tiger Woods, and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg are some of the outstanding names featured in TIME’s list.
Noted actor Priyanka Chopra wrote a profile for Katju and Guruswamy in TIME magazine after launching the influential people’s listing on Wednesday.
“Arundhati and Menaka have helped take a massive step for LGBTQ rights in the international’s biggest democracy. In their committed fight for justice, they’ve shown us that we as a society have to resort to making development, even after laws are changed, and that we should make an effort to recognize, take delivery of, and love,” Chopra wrote.
In September 2018, a constitutional bench of the Supreme Court in part struck down Section 377 in a unanimous decision. The judgment became considered groundbreaking, as the United SStatescourt eventually overturned a colonial-era ban imposed on consensual homosexual intercourse. The judgment turned into seemed like a welcome step in confirmation of human dignity.
Katju and Guruswamy contended before the courtroom that sexuality and its expression, in fact, were fundamental human experiences, and Section 377 enabled discrimination, which became the essential right of a character. Senior Advisor Guruswamy is a graduate of the National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bangalore, and a Rhodes Scholar. In September 2017, a portrait of her was unveiled at Rhodes House at Oxford University.
She holds an LLM diploma from Harvard Law School and a D.Phil from Oxford University. She additionally featured within the 6th Harvard Law International Women’s Day Portrait Exhibit in advance this 12 months.
She has been a traveling faculty on Yale Law School, Columbia Law School, and New York University School of Law. She recently became a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin for 2016-2017. Katju, too, graduated from NLSIU, Bangalore, and holds an LLM diploma from Columbia Law School, where she became a human rights fellow, James Kent Scholar, and public interest honoree.
She is a touring faculty at the National Law University, Delhi. She also served as a panel legal professional for the Delhi High Court Legal Services Committee. She specializes in representing infant sexual abuse victims.
