Team New Delhi - Access to Justice- Prison Reform
Madhurima Dhanuka - Access to Justice, New Delhi Office
Madhurima Dhanuka is the Programme Lead of the Prison Reforms Programme. She is a lawyer with an LL.M. in Criminal Justice from the University of Nottingham, UK. Prior to joining CHRI she was practicing in the High Court of Madhya Pradesh. She has been associated with CHRI since 2008, and has published numerous studies, reports and resource materials on issues relating to prisoners and the criminal justice system. The primary focus area of her work has been to target unnecessary and prolonged detention of undertrials and work towards systemic interventions to prevent it. In addition to working towards ensuring effective access to legal aid for persons in custody, she has also been at the helm of a number of public interest litigations on repatriation of foreign national prisoners, detention of juveniles in prisons and ensuring physical production of accused persons in court. She has contributed to a couple of UNODC publications on legal aid and was a part of the working group who drafted the Johannesburg Principles on Access to Legal Aid in 2014. There is hardly a moment you wont find her working, in case you do, she would be cooking or reading a book. She can be reached at madhurima@humanrightsinitiative.org.
Sugandha Shankar - Access to Justice, New Delhi Office
Sugandha Shankar is a Senior Programme Officer in the Prison Reforms Programme. She is a law graduate from ILS Law College, Pune, and holds a Diploma in Human Rights and Law. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi. She also contributes by experience gathered from a WHO (World Health Organization) project, where she worked on the curriculum building project on International Diploma in Mental Health Law and Human Rights. She also participated in the Feminist Jurisprudence course conducted by the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She can be reached at sugandha@humanrightsinitiative.org
Deepan Kumar Sarkar - Access to Justice, New Delhi Office
Deepan Kumar Sarkar is the Volunteer, West Bengal. He is an alumnus of La Martiniere for Boys, Kolkata and holds a B.A.LL.B from the Department of Law, University of Calcutta and also a Diploma in Cyber Law from the Asian School of Cyber Laws. He has been working with CHRI since 2011. He is also a practising Advocate at the High Court, Calcutta and primary deals in Constitutional, Company, other Civil matters and at times, Criminal matters and preventive detention matters too. He has been associated with CHRI’s legal aid clinics inside the Alipore and Dum Dum Central Correctional Homes, helps with the research and preparation of CHRI Reports and works closely with the West Bengal State Legal Services Authority and the High Court Legal Services Committee to strengthen the Legal aid system in Jails. He is the co-author (with Samaraditya Pal, Barrister and Senior Advocate) of the multi-volume treatise, "India’s Constitution, - Origins and Evolution", published by LexisNexis (2014 onwards) and has also been a contributor to "The Law of Contempt" (by Samaraditya Pal) - 5th edition, 2013, also published by LexisNexis. He has participated in the International Seminar on Rule of Law and Fundamental Rights organized by the Friedrich Neumann Foundation in Germany, has also trained young lawyers and politicians on Rule of Law and Fundamental Rights in Indonesia and has been part of various other CHRI seminars and training sessions. When not lawyering or doing CHRI work or writing, he loves being immersed in the film-verse of Ingmar Bergman, Andrei Tarkovsky, Satyajit Ray, listening to Indian and Western Classical music and reading on Philosophy. He can be reached at deepan@humanrightsinitiative.org
Sabika Abbas - Access to Justice, New Delhi Office
Sabika Abbas is a Programme officer with the Prison Reforms Program. She pursued her Bachelors in Journalism (Hons.) from Lady Shri Ram College for Women (LSR), Delhi University followed by an MA in Social Work with a specialisation in Criminology and Justice from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai. Before joining CHRI, Sabika was a Criminal Justice Fellow with TISS, working on the issue of socio-legal rights of inmates at the Aligarh District Prison, UP. Her research areas include the Kashmir Conflict, with a focus on socio-legal rights of the victims of enforced disappearance and the role of media in a conflict zone. At CHRI, she has been working towards reducing pre-trial detention by working on improving access to legal aid. Apart from prisons she has a fascination for grey clouds and quaint hill stations. She can be reached at sabika@