A Supreme Court Bench of Justices K.M. Joseph and B.V. Nagarathna is scheduled on March 27 to hear petitions, including one filed by Bilkis Bano, challenging the premature release of 11 men sentenced to life imprisonment for her gangrape during the 2002 riots.
With this, the case has been shifted from the Bench headed by Justice Ajay Rastogi.
Also read: Explained | How did the Bilkis Bano convicts walk free?
The listing has come about after repeated mentionings made by advocate Shobha Gupta, Ms. Bano's lawyer, for an early hearing. In the last mentioning, Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud had assured Ms. Gupta that he would constitute a Bench.
The case had been referred back to the CJI after Justice Bela Trivedi, the Associate Judge accompanying Justice Rastogi, recused herself from hearing both Ms. Bano's petition and those filed by several individuals, including CPI (M) leader Subhashini Ali and others like TMC leader Mahua Moitra.
In January, Justice Rastogi had tagged the third-party petitions of Ms. Ali and Ms. Moitra with that of Ms. Bano and ordered the case to be listed whenever Justice Trivedi was not a part of the Bench.
Also read: Centre went against own guidelines to sanction release of Bilkis Bano case convicts
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, for Gujarat, and advocate Rishi Malhotra, for the accused, had earlier challenged the locus standi of “third party petitioners” to challenge the premature release”. They had dubbed the petitioners as “interlopers”.
However, the court had made it clear that the question of locus standi of the third parties did not arise anymore as Ms. Bano herself had approached the court against the release.
Incidentally, a Review Bench led by Justice Rastogi had already dismissed a petition filed by Ms. Bano to review a May 2022 judgment of the court. This judgment had cleared the path for Gujarat to consider and release the convicts, who were serving life sentence in her case, under the State’s Premature Release Policy of 1992.
Gujarat’s stand
The Gujarat government had argued that the decision to release the convicts prematurely had been taken after following the procedure established by law.
“All the prisoners have completed 14 plus years in the prison under life imprisonment and opinions of the authorities concerned have been obtained as per the premature release policy of 1992 and submitted to the Ministry of Home Affairs vide letter dated June 28, 2022 and sought the approval of the Government of India. The Government of India conveyed the concurrence/approval of the Central government under Section 435 of the Code of Criminal Procedure for premature release of 11 prisoners in a letter on July 11, 2022,” the 57-page affidavit had said.
