Jammu and Kashmir High Court quashed the Public Safety Act for award-winning Kashmiri journalist Aasif Sultan, the longest-serving journalist detainee, and ordered his release.
Justice Vinod Chatterji Koul, in a judgement this week, quashed Aasif’s detention order dated April 9, 2022.
The court said the detaining authority had not followed the procedural requirement by not supplying the material — grounds for detention copy — to the detainee on which the detention order is based.
“If detenu is not supplied the material…he will not be in a position to make an effective representation against the detention order,” Justice Koul said.
In April last year, Aasif was granted bail by the NIA court after spending four long years in prison but was instead booked under the Public Safety Act to prolong his detention.
He was later sent to far-off Kot Bhalwal jail. It is not yet clear whether he will be released this time.
The court said he should be set free provided he was not required in any other case.
Aasif, a reporter with the news magazine Kashmir Narrator and the first Valley journalist booked under the anti-terror Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), was arrested in 2018 for allegedly sheltering militants who killed a policeman that year during a gun battle in Srinagar.
Aasif and his family had denied the charges.
Aasif’s family, lawyer and his magazine insisted he had been arrested for his professional work, saying his ordeal had begun after he wrote an article, “The Rise of Burhan”, for the magazine.
Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani was killed by the security forces in July 2016. The article was written two years after his death. Police had earlier accused Aasif of glorifying the militancy in his writings.
The journalist received the John Aubuchon Press Freedom Award from the American National Press Club in 2019 and was featured in TIME magazine’s 10 “Most Urgent” cases of threats to press freedom around the world in 2020.
New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a non-profit, non-government organisation, later in 2020 ran a full-page advertisement in The Washington Post to express solidarity with Aasif.
In 2021, the Clooney Foundation for Justice (CFJ), founded by Hollywood actor, producer and screenwriter George Clooney and his lawyer wife Amal Clooney, announced its decision to monitor his trial. His hearings had been deferred multiple times and there was almost no hearing for two years because of the Covid pandemic.
The court order came days after the government released Fahad Shah, editor of a news portal, who spent nearly two years in jail.
Historic, says Modi
New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Monday termed the Supreme Court verdict “historic”.
“Today’s Supreme Court verdict on the abrogation of Article 370 is historic and constitutionally upholds the decision taken by the Parliament of India on 5th August 2019,” PM Modi posted on X with the hashtag #NayaJammuKashmir.
He praised the top court’s “profound wisdom” and said the judgment “has fortified the very essence of unity that we, as Indians, hold dear and cherish above all else”.
Home minister Amit Shah said: “Today, the Supreme Court’s verdict has proved that the decision to abrogate #Article370 was completely constitutional.”
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