Srinagar, Aug. 10 -- Srinagar's Social Welfare Department keeps a sealed cover in a government office, and inside it sits the answer to a question that has consumed courtrooms, careers, and the lives of children who have no lawyer to speak for them.

The cover holds interview results for the chairperson and six members of the Jammu and Kashmir Commission for Protection of Child Rights, a body Parliament ordered into existence in 2005 and that still, twenty-one years later, does not legally exist.

A 42-year-old academic in Srinagar knows exactly what he thinks belongs in that cover, and what does not.

He holds a Ph.D. in law from the University of Kashmir, a doctoral thesis on human rights, and a Master of Laws with Distinction from a un...