Justice For All Condemns Indian Court’s Multiple Life Sentences for Kashmiri Women Activists, Calls for UN and US Action

NEW YORK, April 3, 2026

Justice For All strongly condemns the March 24 decision by an Indian special intelligence court to sentence three leading Kashmiri Muslim women activists — Aasiya Andrabi, 64, Nahida Nasreen, 61, and Sofi Fahmeeda, 36 — to multiple life terms and thirty-year sentences respectively, despite the prosecution failing to prove any act of violence or terrorist affiliation. This ruling represents a grave miscarriage of justice and a weaponization of India’s counter-terrorism laws against political dissent.

The case against the three women began in 2021, three years after their arrest in 2018. In a 290-page judgment issued in January 2026, the court acquitted all three on the most serious charges: waging war against India, raising funds for terrorist acts and membership in a terrorist organization. The prosecution examined fifty-three witnesses and reviewed extensive digital and financial evidence. It could not demonstrate a single act of violence carried out by, or at the instance of, these women. The court itself acknowledged that no violent incident had been brought on record pursuant to any endorsement or encouragement by the accused.

Yet the court then convicted them under lesser provisions — including Section 18 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, a law that punishes perceived intent rather than demonstrated action — and imposed the maximum sentences available. The judges explicitly cited Andrabi’s refusal to show remorse for her beliefs as a primary aggravating factor in sentencing. The court also suggested that leniency might have been appropriate had the women been uneducated — a statement that reveals the extent to which the court treated political and intellectual conviction as evidence of greater culpability rather than as a constitutionally protected right.

Ahmed Bin Qasim, a Kashmiri analyst and son of one of the three women sentenced, Asiya Andrabi, noted that India’s UAPA has become a mechanism of administrative control used to detain human rights defenders for their speech and associations — not their actions. “The U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights condemned this law in a scathing May 2025 report,” he said, demanding the immediate, unconditional release of Andrabi, Nasreen and Fahmeeda.

Andrabi, a grandmother of 64 who holds postgraduate degrees in biochemistry, Arabic and Islamic Studies, has spent fifteen of the last thirty years in Indian prisons, mostly without charge. She has been detained more than twenty times under the Public Safety Act alone — a colonial-era law that permits imprisonment without charge or trial for up to two years at a stretch. Amnesty International describes this as a “lawless law.” Since her current arrest in 2018, she has been held in Tihar Jail, more than eight hundred kilometers from her home in Kashmir. Her husband, Dr Muhammad Qasim Faktoo, has been a political prisoner for thirty-three years. Despite a court order permitting them to communicate by phone twice monthly, jail authorities have prevented the couple from speaking since 2016. They have not seen each other since that year.

Fahmeeda, the youngest of the three at thirty-six, was first arrested as a high school student for organizing against a sex scandal in 2006 that implicated Indian officials in the exploitation of Kashmiri women. She has been booked under the Public Safety Act at least nine times since then. She is currently bedridden and wheelchair-dependent — a condition her family attributes directly to years of denied medical care in detention.

The women’s sentencing comes less than two years after India was elected to the U.N. Human Rights Council — a seat it holds while simultaneously imposing life imprisonment on women convicted of no act of violence. The contradiction demands urgent institutional attention.

“This ruling is not justice — it is state-sponsored persecution of Muslim women for their faith, their political beliefs and their refusal to be silenced,” said Imam Malik Mujahid, President of Justice For All.

Justice For All reiterates its call for the release of all Kashmiri political prisoners and urges the following immediate actions:

1. The U.N. Special Rapporteurs on Human Rights Defenders, on Torture, and on Arbitrary Detention should issue urgent communications to the Government of India regarding the cases of Andrabi, Nasreen and Fahmeeda.
2. The United States Congress should hold oversight hearings on India’s human rights record in Kashmir, and the administration should raise these cases directly with Prime Minister Modi.