STILL WAITING: Nepal’s Reparations Debt and the Special Rapporteur’s Visit
By Ojaswi K.C., Human Rights and Justice Centre
Fulmati Nyaya*, a survivor of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), had already filed her complaint with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) when she was called back for a verification consultation in April 2026. She was told to appear the same day, with no consideration for the distance she would need to travel. She could not come that day. When she arrived the following day, complainants were gathered in a crowded room and asked to provide statements simultaneously, without consideration for her privacy. Her concerns about being interviewed by a male staff member and about insufficient travel reimbursement were dismissed. This is what accountability looks like in Nepal, two decades after the peace accord.
Fulmati’s experience is not an exception. It is the rule. Kalyan Budhathoki was both a conflict victim and a leader who spent two decades beside survivors navigating that same institutional failure. Conflict victims’ organisations remembered him as someone who stood in “every sorrow and struggle”. He died on 9 April 2026 without seeing it addressed. His family is still waiting for the reparations Nepal promised. Nepal made binding commitments to people like them. It has not kept them. Those commitments are not rhetorical. Nepal ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights in 1991, binding itself to investigate serious human rights violations and provide remedies. When domestic processes fail, individuals can bring complaints directly to the Committee. Since 1991, it has issued 29 Views against Nepal, 24 on violations during the 1996–2006 armed conflict. The 92 people documented include victims of torture, enforced disappearances, CRSV and extrajudicial killing: 43% women, 26% children, 35% from indigenous communities. Fulmati is one of them. Not one View has been fully implemented. Only 3 of the 92 have received any compensation. Nepal’s average implementation grade is “C”. That record makes the August 2024 amendment to the Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act (TRC Act), 2014 important to assess. It recognized CRSV, established a reparations fund, and created a special court for serious violations. But it retained amnesty provisions declared void by Nepal’s own Supreme Court in 2015. Survivors were given three months to file complaints, a window that has already lapsed. On 30 April 2026, the Supreme Court issued a mandamus order pressing the government on commitments it has not kept. The pattern is familiar: legislation announced, implemented partially, then quietly abandoned.
That pattern has outlasted every government. The Gen Z protests of September 2025 left more than 75 people dead. Human Rights and Justice Centre have observed that the culture of impunity rooted in the conflict contributed to those deaths. The Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), led by Prime Minister Balendra Shah, emerged from the March 2026 elections with a near two-thirds majority. Unlike every government before it, the RSP has no stake in the conflict and carries none of that baggage. But the early signs are not encouraging. The TRC and CIEDP commissioners, already rejected by victims as political quota appointments, were removed by ordinance, bypassing legislative scrutiny. Transitional justice does not appear on the government’s 100-point agenda. When Parliament received the Policy and Programme on 11 May, point no. 84 committed to concluding transitional justice processes as soon as possible, a commitment limited to paper. Beside it sit regulations that remain unendorsed and a commission without sitting members. The Shah government’s response to the killings was no different from those of previous governments: the former prime minister and home minister were arrested within a day, then released after 13 days, while officers with direct command responsibility have not been prosecuted.
Nepal’s transitional justice failures have been documented for years by human rights organisations, UN bodies, victim groups and civil society, including domestically. The most recent instance is a joint letter to Prime Minister Shah from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the International Commission of Jurists, dated 1 May 2026. It has received no response. It is into this silence that Bernard Duhaime, the UN Special Rapporteur on Truth, Justice, Reparations and Guarantees of Non-Recurrence, arrives in June. For survivors like Fulmati, who have waited two decades for compensation that has not come, it is one of the few mechanisms Nepal cannot entirely dismiss.
But it will mean something only if the report reflects what it finds on the ground. A visit that treats consultations as evidence of their quality, or legislation as evidence of political will, will not reach the people it is meant to serve. And a government that treats the visit as an occasion to perform rather than to act will not reach them either.
The RSP alone has what no previous government could claim: distance from the conflict and the freedom to act on it. The question Duhaime should put plainly is not whether the opportunity exists. It does. The question is whether this government understands that Fulmati, and the thousands like her, will not survive another cycle of it being wasted. Kalyan did not. * Fulmati Nyaya’s account is shared with her knowledge and consent.
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