Once Rohingya refugees complete their jail term after being caught as illegal immigrants, they cannot be kept in prison, said Calcutta High Court. The refugees will have to be taken to a safe place, said the lawyer of four Rohingya petitioners who have completed their jail term in 2018.
A Division Bench of Chief Justice T.B. Radhakrishnan and Justice Arijit Bandopadhyay said once the jail term of a convicted person was over, he could not be kept in the prison. The government could shift them to a safe place and continue to monitor but jail was not the place to lodge them, Sudip Ghosh Chowdhury, counsel of the Rohingya refugees, said quoting from the court’s observation.
Mr. Ghosh Chowdhury had moved the court on behalf of an organisation that filed a habeas corpus petition to produce the arrested Rohingya refugees. The petition said the refugees, who were arrested in 2016, completed their jail term in the summer of 2018. However, even nearly two years after their term completion, the four refugees were still lodged in the Dum Dum Correctional Home which was unacceptable, the court said.
Earlier in December, in another case, the High Court stayed deportation of a Rohingya couple acknowledging that they had risk to their lives in Myanmar.
