New Delhi
In a setback to the NDA government on the eve of the first phase of Lok Sabha elections, the Supreme Court today rejected its objections and decided to rely on fresh documents to decide a review petition in the Rafale deal case.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThere is no provision in the Official Secrets \nAct and no such provision in any other statute has been brought to our \nnotice by which Parliament has vested any power in the executive arm of \nthe government either to restrain publication of documents marked as \nsecret or from placing such documents before a Court of Law, which may \nhave been called upon to adjudicate a legal issue concerning the \nparties,\u201d said a Bench of Chief Justice of India Ranjan Gogoi, Justice \nSanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice KM Joseph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The NDA government had \nsigned a deal with France in 2016 for the purchase of 36 Rafale fighter \njets manufactured by Dassault Aviation at a cost of Rs 59,000 crore in \nflyaway condition. Alleging irregularities, Sinha, Shourie and Bhushan \nhad sought a probe into the deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But the Bench had on December \n14 dismissed the petition, holding there was no commercial favouritism \nand occasion to \u201creally doubt the decision-making process\u201d warranting \nsetting aside of the contract.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The controversy in the review \npetition relates to three documents an eight\u00adpage note dated June 1, \n2016, written by three members of Indian Negotiating Team for Rafale \ndeal and two \u201csecret\u201d documents Note\u00ad18 of the Ministry of Defence and \nNote\u00ad10 written by Ministry of Defence Deputy Secretary SK Sharma relied\n upon in the review petition. Attorney General KK Venugopal had \nquestioned the admissibility of the three documents \u201cstolen\u201d from the \nMoD and relied upon by Sinha, Shourie and Bhushan in their review \npetition, contending it amounted to a crime under the Official Secrets \nAct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The government had claimed privilege over these documents \nand said even RTI Act didn\u2019t allow such documents to be shared. \nVenugopal had also claimed that certain State actions were outside the \npurview ofjudicial review and which lie within the \npolitical domain. But the three judges on the Bench unanimously \nrejected the government\u2019s objections. \u201cThe test of admissibility of \nevidence lies in its relevancy, unless there is an \nexpress or necessarily implied prohibition in the Constitution \nor other law evidence obtained as a result of illegal search or \nseizure is not liable to be shut out,\u201d it said, citing a SC verdict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cInsofar\n as the claim of privilege is concerned, on the very face of it, Section\n 123 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872, relates to unpublished public \nrecords. As already noticed, the three documents have been published \nin different editions of The Hindu,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat apart\u2026 a \nclaim of immunity against disclosure under Section 123 of the Indian \nEvidence Act has to be essentially adjudged on the touchstone of public \ninterest and to satisfy itself that public interest is not put to \njeopardy by requiring disclosure, the Court may even inspect the \ndocument in question though the said power has to be sparingly \nexercised,\u201d it noted.\n\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New DelhiIn a setback to the NDA government on the eve of the first phase of Lok Sabha elections, the Supreme Court today rejected its objections and decided to rely on fresh documents to decide a review petition in the Rafale deal case. \u201cThere is no provision in the Official Secrets Act and no such […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":58902,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[312],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-58901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-india"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=58901"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58901\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":58903,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/58901\/revisions\/58903"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58902"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=58901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=58901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=58901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}