New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Friday issued notice to the Jammu and Kashmir government in a petition filed by Jammu and Kashmir High Court Bar Association President Mian Abdul Qayoom, challenging the High Court’s dismissal of his plea against his detention under the Public Safety Act, Bar and Bench reported.
The petition added that the High Court upheld Qayoom’s detention based on first information reports filed against him in 2008 and 2010. “These FIRs are stale, irrelevant and have no proximate, pertinent or live link to the present, and are thus superfluous and extraneous to the satisfaction required in law qua the tendency or propensity to act in a manner prejudicial to public order,”Qayoom’s plea said.
The petition also claimed that Qayoom was neither chargesheeted not arrested in connection with the FIRs at the time. He was simply detained under the Public Safety Act, and his detention was later revoked. Therefore, the plea argued, the lawyer cannot be detained under the Act once again using the same FIRs.
The police had arrested Qayoom on the intervening night of August 4 and August 5, 2019, hours before the Centre revoked the special status of Jammu and Kashmir under Article 370 of the Constitution, and imposed a curfew in the state. Qayoom is currently lodged in Tihar Jail in New Delhi, after first being held in a prison in Agra.
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