New Delhi, April 29
The Supreme Court today reserved its judgment on a bunch of petitions challenging the constitutional validity of the controversial Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA), which the states ruled by the opposition parties have refused to implement.
The judgment was reserved by a Bench comprising Mr Justice S Rajindra Babu and Mr Justice
G.P. Mathur on about half a dozen Public Interest Litigations (PILs) filed by the People’s Union of Civil Liberties and others, after marathon arguments by counsel for the Centre and the petitioners.
While Attorney-General Soli J Sorabjee had justified the enactment of POTA, describing it as a national necessity to protect the security, integrity and sovereignty of the country in the face of cross-border terrorism and militancy in various states, the petitioners challenged the Act on the ground that it “violated” the fundamental rights of the citizens.
The petitioners’ counsel had cited opposition by most of the states to POTA, including the militancy-infested Jammu and Kashmir, as an example to strengthen their argument against the law.
They also said that POTA’s earlier version, TADA was grossly misused as only 4.22 per cent of the 76,000 accused rounded up under it were convicted by the courts across the country.
“There is every apprehension of POTA being misused in the same manner as TADA,” PUCL counsel Rajinder Sachar had argued.
However, Mr Sorabjee had said that mere apprehension of “misuse” would not render a law “constitutionally invalid”. If there was any gross misuse, that action of the authorities had to be quashed and not the law itself, he had argued.
