16 Oct 2023 5:55 AM GMT
The NewsClick matter has reached the Supreme Court with its Editor-in-Chief Prabir Purkayastha and Human Resources head Amit Chakraborty filing a Special Leave Petition challenging the Delhi High Court's judgment which upheld their arrest by the Delhi Police in a case under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act over alleged Chinese funding to promote anti-national propaganda.
Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal mentioned the petition on Monday morning before Chief Justice of India DY Chandrachud for urgent listing.
"This is the NewsClick matter...the journalists are in the police custody...a 70-year old man...." Sibal said.
CJI Chandrachud asked Sibal to circulate the papers and said that he will take a call on the listing. It was on last Friday (October 13) that a bench of Justice Tushar Rao Gedela of the High Court dismissed the petition by holding that the arrests of the accused were legal and valid.
The arrests were made by the Delhi Police on October 3 following widespread raids carried out at the office of the NewsClick and the residences of its editors and reporters. The main ground of challenge raised by the petitioners was that the arrest was vitiated as they were not informed of the grounds of arrest in writing. They were not supplied with the copy of the FIR until they approached the Court and got an order to that effect. They placed reliance on the recent judgment of the Supreme Court in Pankaj Bansal v. Union of India which quashed the arrests by the Enforcement Directorate in a case for not furnishing the grounds of the arrest in writing.
In the judgment, the High Court held that the Pankaj Bansal case, which was rendered in the context of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, was not applicable to the UAPA.