India's Supreme Court has agreed to consider a plea to transfer a gang-rape trial outside New Delhi. Source: AAP
THE trial of five Indian men accused of raping and murdering a 23-year-old student has started in a fast-track court for crimes against women.
A sixth suspect in the attack claims to be a juvenile and his case is being handled separately.
The court will hear arguments on Monday from defence lawyers appealing for the case, currently being held in a closed court, to be opened to the public, officials said.
"There is an immense interest in the public in this case, let it be all out in the open court," one of the defence lawyers, A.P. Singh, said.
Police say the victim and a male friend were heading home from an evening movie on December 16 when they boarded a bus, where they were attacked by the six assailants. The attackers beat the man and raped the woman, causing her massive internal injuries with a metal bar, police said.
The victims were eventually dumped on the roadside, and the woman died two weeks later in a Singapore hospital.
Lawyers for the accused say police mistreated their clients and beat them to force them to confess. One lawyer said he would ask the Supreme Court to move the trial out of New Delhi.
The attack has sparked demands for wholesale changes in the way India deals with crimes against women.
Many families pressure relatives who have been assaulted not to press charges, police often refuse to file cases for those who do and courts rarely deliver swift justice in the few cases that do get filed.
Indian courts had a backlog of 33 million cases as of 2011. In a small sign of the sluggish pace of justice, only one of the 635 rape cases filed in the capital last year has ended in a conviction so far.
Police spokesman Rajan Bhagat said many other cases were pending and it was not realistic to expect crimes committed late last year to have wound their way through the system yet.
New Delhi set up five fast-track courts in recent weeks to deal specifically with sexual assault cases.
The courts were an important step for clearing some of the 95,000 rape cases pending in India, said Ranjana Kumari, a women's activist and director of the Centre for Social Research, a New Delhi based think tank.
"We need a system in which women can get justice quickly. Otherwise, in the normal course of things, it can take 10 or 12 or 14 years for cases to be taken up by the court. That is tantamount to denying justice to the victim," she said.
Others, however, worried that fast-track courts sacrifice justice for speed, overlooking evidence, limiting the cross-examination of witnesses and racing through hearings.
Vrinda Grover, a senior lawyer in the Delhi High Court and a women's rights activist, said the traditional court system needs to be overhauled - not abandoned - to give proper justice to rape victims.
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