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Preventive detention is a serious invasion of liberty: Supreme Court
Preventive detention is a serious invasion of personal liberty, the Supreme Court said on Friday, as it noted that constitutional safeguards in such matters are non-negotiable.
Preventive detention is a serious invasion of personal liberty, the Supreme Court said on Friday, as it noted that constitutional safeguards in such matters are non-negotiable.
A bench headed by Chief Justice of India Uday Umesh Lalit made the remarks as it set aside a preventive detention order passed by Tripura government in November 2021 against a man to prevent illicit drug trafficking, on grounds of non-application of mind and withholding of vital information by authorities.
The bench, which included justices S Ravindra Bhat and JB Pardiwala, pointed out that apart from contravention of the safeguards, a detention order can also be vitiated on account of unexplained delay in detaining the person.
“Preventive detention is a serious invasion of personal liberty and the normal methods open to a person charged with commission of any offence to disprove the charge or to prove his innocence at the trial are not available to the person preventively detained and, therefore, in preventive detention jurisprudence, whatever little safeguards the Constitution and the enactments authorising such detention provide, assume utmost importance and must be strictly adhered to,” underlined the court.
It highlighted that a detention order becomes bad in law if all relevant facts about the person proposed to be detained are either concealed or not placed by police before appropriate authorities.
“The requisite subjective satisfaction, the formation of which is a condition precedent to passing of a detention order, will get vitiated if material or vital facts which would have a bearing on the issue and weighed the satisfaction of the detaining authority one way or the other and influence his mind are either withheld or suppressed by the sponsoring authority or ignored and not considered by the detaining authority before issuing the detention order,” said the bench.
Citing a previous Supreme Court judgment which laid down that preventive detention is devised to afford protection to society, the bench said that in view of the objective of the power given to authorities, it is imperative for them to remain vigilant in taking a person in lawful custody “at the earliest”.
“Any indifferent attitude on the part of the detaining authority or executing authority would defeat the very purpose of the preventive action and turn the detention order as a dead letter and frustrate the entire proceedings,” it held. The court added that an unexplained delay between passing the order of detention and date of the proposal would snap the “live & proximate link” between the grounds of detention and its purpose.
In the current case, the bench noted that the detention order was bad not only because there was a gap of five months between the proposal and passing of the detention order, but also because the police officers failed to inform the detaining authority that the accused had been released on bail in the two drugs cases that formed the basis of the detention order.
“Had this fact (bail) been brought to the notice of the detaining authority, then it would have influenced the mind of the detaining authority one way or the other on the question whether or not to make an order of detention. The state never thought to even challenge the bail orders passed by the special court releasing the appellant on bail,” said the bench, quashing the detention order against Sushanta Kumar Banik.
