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“Right to Silence”: A Commentary on Misinterpretation and Violation by the Indian Judiciary
- Sushil Kumar Jain, Sujay Jain
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- Journal:
- International Annals of Criminology / Volume 60 / Issue 1 / March 2022
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 10 June 2022, pp. 118-139
- Print publication:
- March 2022
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- Article
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- Open access
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The Indian Constitution, being the lengthiest constitution in the world, seeks to accord the “right to silence” the status of a fundamental right, a particularly high threshold from which little to no derogation is permissible. This constitutional guarantee has also been given a statutory backing, wherein the silence of an accused cannot be used to draw an adverse inference against him. As a country which hails itself as a champion of personal liberty, it is disheartening to see that the reality of the situation is disappointing. The draconian pre-Constitution jurisprudence is still followed by most judgements, and often the silence of an accused is used as a “missing link” on the part of the prosecution to establish an accused’s guilt. This occurs either due to the correct provisions not being brought before the notice of the courts, or due to the courts adjudicating in derogation of statutory provisions and settled case laws. In this paper, the authors seek to establish the correct position of the law by taking into account its evolution in Indian and other jurisdictions, and then establish how India continues to fail to give effect to this right, by empirically analysing several judgements of the Supreme Court of India.
3 - Phylogenomics of Nematoda
- from Part I - Next Generation Phylogenetics
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- By Mark Blaxter, University of Edinburgh, UK, Georgios Koutsovoulos, University of Edinburgh, UK, Martin Jones, University of Edinburgh, UK, Sujai Kumar, University of Edinburgh, UK, Ben Elsworth, University of Edinburgh, UK
- Edited by Peter D. Olson, Natural History Museum, London, Joseph Hughes, University of Glasgow, James A. Cotton
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- Book:
- Next Generation Systematics
- Published online:
- 05 June 2016
- Print publication:
- 16 June 2016, pp 62-83
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Summary
Nematode diversity
Nematodes are characterized in the wider public and scientific community as being both rare (very few people have ever seen a nematode) and very well understood (the ‘model nematode’ Caenorhabditis elegans is one of the cornerstones of modern biology). However nematologists in particular, and many ecologists, know that nematodes are both numerically abundant and systematically diverse, dominating many ecosystems. The sheer abundance of free-living nematodes and their generally small body size, even as adults, can confound attempts to itemize the presence of species. Whereas 23 000 species have been formally described, estimates of true species-level abundance range from 0.5 million to over 10 million (Lambshead and Boucher 2003; Lambshead 1993; Blaxter 2011). The wide range in these estimates reflects differences in underpinning assumptions as to the efficiency of modern taxonomic methodologies and the likely species–area relationships for meiofaunal taxa. Indeed, many of the currently described taxa are relatively large organisms that are parasites of animals and plants, and the current taxonomic understanding of free-living species, particularly in the tropics and in marine sediments, is likely to be significantly lacking.
The small size of individual nematodes (most are less than 1 mm in longest body axis), and the even smaller size of diagnostic morphological characters, has rendered nematode systematics at deeper levels problematic (De Ley and Bert 2002; De Ley and Blaxter 2002; 2004; De Ley et al. 2005). What has been clear from over 150 years of nematode systematics is that morphological character sets have not yielded unequivocal support for any deeper branching patterns within Nematoda. Nematologists have thus been enthusiastic and productive adopters of molecular phylogenetic methods, and molecular data have been employed in analyses from species delimitation to inter-phylum relationships.
Nematoda is a phylum within Metazoa, placed in the superphylum Ecdysozoa (arthropods, priapulids and allies) (Aguinaldo et al. 1997). Based on both morphological and molecular data, the sister phylum to Nematoda is Nematomorpha, a species-poor group of parasites of arthropods. Here we discuss briefly the history of molecular analyses of nematode phylogenetics, and explore how multi-locus, genome-sequence-derived datasets are set to resolve many remaining issues. Resolving Nematoda is important for several phylum-specific reasons: defining the origins of parasitism in several different lineages, understanding the assembly of various ecosystems, mapping the patterns of diversification and revealing the evolutionary patterns in developmental and other systems.
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