Navdeep Singh

Navdeep Singh is a practising lawyer at the Punjab and Haryana High Court, Chandigarh. He is also the founder president of the Armed Forces Tribunal Bar Association in Chandigarh. Navdeep has been a volunteer–reservist with the Territorial Army in the rank of major in the past. He has been decorated with a record eleven commendations from the army, air force and tri-service institutions for his work for the military community and veterans and other issues confronting the defence services. Besides constitutional and civil and military service matters, he has enthusiastically worked in the fields of rights of disabled soldiers, military widows, civil and military pensioners and on the subject of gender discrimination. He has worked for global reforms in military justice and improvement of tribunals in India. He has also dealt with landmark litigation on tribunalization till the Supreme Court of India. Based on the sentiment expressed by the Prime Minister of India for curbing unnecessary litigation initiated by the Ministry of Defence against its employees and former employees, he was made a part (gratis) of a high-level committee of experts constituted by the then defence minister for reducing such litigation by the Ministry of Defence and the defence services in legal, service and pension-related matters, and to strengthen the system of redressal of grievances. He has attended, lectured and spoken at multiple international and national-level seminars, conferences, universities, institutions and meets, and has written on law, military and public policy for national and international publications. He was a part of the historic ‘Yale Draft (Principles)’ on military justice, an improvement of the existing United Nations document on the same subject, at a meet at the Yale Law School attended by global jurists and representatives of the United Nations. He was also a part of the drafting committee of the momentous ‘Commonwealth Military Justice Principles’, popularly known as the ‘Stellenbosch Draft’. He has authored five books. He is also a member of the International Society for Military Law and the Law of War, Brussels, and an international fellow of the National Institute of Military Justice, Washington, D.C. He is part of a five-member advisory committee of global experts on military justice recently constituted by the Commonwealth Secretariat, London, and the honorary chief editor of Forces Law Review, the first international military law journal.
When not in court, he’s probably engrossed in listening to ‘Purple Rain’ or dissecting pop culture.