Christine Mehta

Research

Before I edited other people's work, I spent a decade reporting for human rights organizations in places where evidence was tough to uncover.

  1. 2012 to 2014

    The report that got me deported

    I joined Amnesty India as a researcher and campaigner and spent two years on the ground in Jammu and Kashmir documenting abuses under the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, the law that shields soldiers from prosecution in civilian courts. The work meant interviews with families of the disappeared, survivors of torture, and the lawyers who had spent decades filing petitions nobody answered.

    On November 8, 2014, as the report neared publication, police arrived at my door in Bengaluru. Within days the Ministry of Home Affairs had revoked my overseas-citizen status and ordered me out of the country. The report, Denied, was published the following year; I wrote about the expulsion in The Hindu.

    India's progressive visa policy makes living and working in India easy for most second and third generation Indians living abroad, except for those working in environmental and human rights.From "How I was deported from India"
  2. 2015 to 2017

    Health care under siege, from Kashmir to Turkey to the American courtroom

    At Physicians for Human Rights I investigated attacks on medicine wherever the state got in the way of care. In southeastern Turkey I documented eleven months of curfews during which security forces militarized hospitals, blocked ambulances, and prosecuted doctors for treating the wrong patients; I later wrote about one of those trials for The New York Times. Back in Kashmir, I recorded the use of pellet guns and live fire against protesters in 2016, and the harassment of the health workers who treated them. I co-wrote Truth Matters, PHR's case for accountability for the CIA's psychological torture program. And in the United States I led a three-state investigation into drug courts, which found that criminal justice priorities routinely override the medical treatment participants are promised.

  3. 2022 to 2023

    How the press covers the far right

    As a senior researcher at PEN America I studied white supremacist and extremist movements and the journalism that covers them. The result was Hate in the Headlines, a report on how newsrooms can cover extremism without amplifying it, along with a review of public media's reporting on militia activity at the southern border that found the risks of "both sides" framing when one side is armed.