CIVIL LIBERTIES HUMAN RIGHTS IN AREAS OFTERRORISM AND INSURGENCY India's often lonely fight against terrorism has grown less lonely as the realization has 3.1 gradually spread, since the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights and as a result of more recent events, that 'The acts, methods and practices of terrorism in all its forms and manifestations... . are activities aimed at the destruction of human rights." The 1994 United Nations Declaration on Measures to Eliminate InternationalTerrorism marked a further advance in clearing the intellectual and conceptual confusion that so often attended discussion of this matter in human rights circles. That Declaration affirmed, in its paragraph 3, that *Criminal acts intended or calculated to provoke a state of terror in the general public, a group of persons or particular persons for political purposes are in any 3.2 circumstances unjustifiable, whatever the considerations of a political, philosophical, ideological, racial, ethnic, religious or any other nature that may be invoked to justify them." Successive resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly and of the United 3.3 Nations Commission on Human Rights have, since then, asserted that Yerrorism, in all its forms and manifestations, whenever and by whomever committed, can never be justified in any instance, including as a means to promote and protect human rights." Further, these same resolutions, adopted under the title, *Human Rights and Terrorismn have now also repeatedly contained an "unequivocal condemnation of all pcts, methods and practices of terrorism, regardless of their motivation, in all its forms and manifestations, wherever and by whomever committed as acts of aggression aimed at the destruction of human rights, fundamental freedoms and democracy, threatening the territorial integrity and security of States, destabilizing legitimately constituted Governments, undermining pluralistic civil society and having adverse consequences on the economic and social development of States." It is, in addition, now quite clear that the international community must "enhance cooperation at regional and international levels in the fight against terrorism in accordance with the relevant international instruments, including those relating to human rights, with the aim of its eradication: as the United Nations General Assembly has repeatedly urged in rdcent years. The eradication of terrorism, however, is no easy task and its relationship with human rights is complex, particuiarly since those engaged in acts of terror are quick to seek the protection of precisely those rights that they violate without compunction and hold in contempt. Not surprisingly, human rights are most readily invoked when those engaged in acts of violence are themselves under siege. Regrettably, the invocation of such rights is now also an intrinsic part of the psychological and political undercurrents of what, euphemistically, is called "lowintensity conflict" but which is, in reality, often war-by-proxy. 3.4 ,-