Activists move Supre Court challenging UAPA versus lawyers by Tripura
BRAND-NEW DELHI: A CPI(ML) member, a human rights activist and a web journalist moved the Supreme Court challenging the Tripura federal government’s action of slapping the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act versus attorneys who published “Tripura is burning” and stated the SC should give a restrictive significance to “unlawful activities” under the UAPA to suppress its widespread abuse.
Tripura Authorities had previously said that action had been taken versus various social networks handles for incorrectly claiming that mosques have actually been burned down in the state when this was not the case.
A bench headed by Chief Justice N V Ramana at first asked petitioner’s supporter, Prashant Bhushan, regarding why they did stagnate the Tripura high court however accepted fix a date for noting the petition for hearing. In general, the SC does not captivate petitions associating with state occurrences and usually asks the petitioners to move the jurisdictional HC prior to approaching the peak court.
First petitioner Mukesh is an advocate signed up with the Bar Council of Delhi and has been associated with the All-India Central Council of Trade Unions, the Communist Celebration of India (Marxist-Leninist) and the Individuals’s Union for Civil Liberties. The 2nd petitioner is Ansarul Haq Ansari, who said he is a human rights activist from Rajasthan. And the 3rd petitioner is Shyam Meera Singh, a journalist with web website Newsclick who typically highlights grievances of marginalised and minority neighborhoods.
The petitioners stated their complaint protests “the targeted political violence against the Muslim minorities in Tripura during the second half of October 2021, and the subsequent efforts by the state to monopolise the flow of info and facts emanating from the affected locations by invoking provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Avoidance) Act versus members of civil society including supporters and reporters who have actually made the effort to bring realities in relation to the targeted violence in the public domain”.
“If the state is enabled to criminalise the very act of fact-finding and reporting, and that too under the rigid arrangements of the UAPA in which anticipatory bail is disallowed and the concept of bail is a remote possibility, then the only truths that will be available in the general public domain are those that are hassle-free to the state due to the ‘chilling result’ on flexibility of speech and expression of members of civil society. If the mission for fact and reporting thereof itself is criminalised then the victim in the procedure is the idea of justice,” they said.
The alleged common violence had appeared in Tripura after Durga Puja pandals were targeted in Bangladesh. Two petitioners, Mukesh and Ansarul, had visited Tripura as members of a fact-finding team and had “put in the public domain a report titled ‘Humankind Under Attack in Tripura’, ‘Muslim Lives Matter’, published by Attorneys for Democracy, in a press release at the Press Club of India” causing the invocation of UAPA against them by the Tripura government.
Interestingly, the UAPA was enacted in 1967 to counter the risk of left-wing extremism to India and its sovereignty.
Released at Thu, 11 Nov 2021 22:25:39 -0600
