The overall objective of the three-year long research project, commencing December 2007, is to develop pluralistic perspectives on the end of impunity and to expand the research and action-oriented discourse on the subject across South Asia on the basis of a more substantial body of factual knowledge and conceptual clarity on the complex character of impunity and its political tenacity. This project hopes to uncover the various ways in which impunity works, affects citizens' rights and contributes to the cycle of violence that South Asian societies are unable to break. By doing this it hopes to hold the State accountable for failing to in its promise to uphold the rule of law and fulfill commitments to international conventions.

The specific objectives of the Project are as follows:

• To document how impunity works at various levels;

• To develop a rational and just framework of liability and compensation, based on empirical and rational evidence of harm cause by State violence, human rights abuses, including physical and mental injury, emotional and moral harm, livelihood losses, and afflictions and agonies born by social collectives;

• To build public pressure and strengthen the ongoing advocacy campaigns for justice and reparation for victims of political violence, including sexual violence, through a regional consultation;

• To conceptualize the methodologies of a remedial framework against sexual violence and a system of accountability in South Asia via a systematic survey of the literature on sexual violence and the domestic legal framework.

For an exhaustive discussion on the context, the objectives, the issues of research and their scope, the methodology, the timeframe, partner organizations and individual experts associated with the project, concept paper can be downloaded here