The Supreme Court has reaffirmed a five-month-old judgment that said the Enforcement Directorate cannot arbitrarily arrest anyone and must furnish the grounds of arrest, dismissing the Centre’s plea for a review.

The latest ruling comes amid allegations that the government is using its investigating agencies to harass political opponents, with critics citing Thursday’s arrest of Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal by the ED as the latest instance.

The bench of Justice A.S. Bopanna and Justice Sanjay Kumar, which dismissed the Centre’s review petition on Wednesday, also rejected a plea for an open-court hearing. The official order was uploaded on Friday. “Application for oral hearing rejected…. We do not find any errors much less apparent in the order impugned, warranting reconsideration. The review petitions are accordingly dismissed,” the order said.

Last October, the bench had ruled that a person cannot be arbitrarily arrested even under the stringent Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002, and that an accused has both a fundamental and a statutory right to be informed of the grounds of arrest.

It had held that trial courts cannot routinely remand such accused in custody without applying their mind and by merely relying on the ECIR (equivalent to the FIR) or other materials furnished by the ED.

It added that the ED, armed with far-reaching powers under the PMLA, is not expected to be vindictive and must be seen to be acting with the utmost probity and with the highest degree of dispassion and fairness.

The October 2023 judgment also said that a failure to respond to questions or summons was not an automatic ground for arrest.

“…The failure of the appellants to respond to the questions put to them by the ED would not be sufficient in itself for the Investigating officer to opine that they were liable to be arrested under Section 19 (of the PMLA),” Justice Sanjay Kumar, who wrote the judgment, said.