Apr
4
Gujarat Hearings Postponed Till After Elections; Government Fails to Discharge Duties to Prosecute Perpetrators
April 4, 2004 | Comments Off on Gujarat Hearings Postponed Till After Elections; Government Fails to Discharge Duties to Prosecute Perpetrators
Manoj Mitta discusses stark evidence demonstrating that the Gujarat Government has misled the Supreme Court about the status of the accused and high court orders in cases stemming from the 2002 pogroms against Muslims.
The Gujarat Government is supposed to prosecute the perpetrators of the carnage, but lawyers, activists, and the Supreme Court have demonstrated the government’s failure to pursue appeals and prosecutions. Activists have called for the transfer of these cases outside of Gujarat.
Afraid of what the press will report in the run-up to elections, the counsel for Gujarat has asked to defer hearings until after the April 20 polls.
Although the court accepted the Gujarat counsel’s plea to postpone hearings, amicus curiae Harish Salve still presented evidence of the failure of the Gujarat counsel and High Court to discharge their duties, supporting his application for transfer of cases outside of Gujarat. Some examples are:
• To show that the accused were being prosecuted with diligence, the Modi Government claimed to Salve in writing that ‘‘almost all the bail applications were rejected.’’ But from the material they sent him, Salve came up with findings just the opposite.
• The bail applications were, in fact, rejected only in the sessions courts. The accused in all those cases, Salve found, have since been either released on bail or altogether acquitted by the Gujarat High Court.
• Even though the cases involve murder charges, the prosecution did not contest bail applications in the High Court and instead agreed to the accused being released by the judge without giving any reason.
• Incredibly, for all the variance in the cases and accused, different judges of the High Court on different dates passed almost identical bail orders. The orders run into over 40 lines and yet, barring the names of persons and places, they contain the same language to the last word.
The Gujarat section of the blog discusses the dismal performance of the Gujarat counsel and Gujarat High Court in other key cases, such as the Best Bakery case where the High Court condemned human rights defenders for conducting documentation.
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