While the petitioner, Ali Mohammad Lone alias Advocate Zahid Ali, had sought a compensation of Rs 25 lakh, the court directed the state to pay Rs 5 lakh.
Quashing the detention of the former spokesperson of the banned Jamaat-e-Islami under the Public Safety Act (PSA), the Jammu and Kashmir High Court has directed the administration to compensate him for the “illegal detention”.
This is the first time the court has penalised the state for detention under the PSA, which allows the authorities to detain a person without trial for up to two years.
“This court cannot resist but to hold that the preventive detention of the petitioner is mala fide and illegal, ab origine and ab intra. The petitioner has been made to suffer loss of his liberty for a cumulative period of more than 1,080 days of preventive custody, covered under the span of four detention orders in a row from 2019 to March 2024,” Justice Rahul Bharti said in his judgement.
The judgement, pronounced on April 3, was uploaded on Friday. “(The) latest preventive detention of the petitioner is compounding the illegality, attending the breach and violation of the petitioner’s fundamental right to personal liberty with impunity, and that entitles him to compensation. Therefore, this court, drawing support from the judgement of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India… reckons this to be a fit case for this court to exercise its constitutional jurisdiction to extend constitutional remedy for grant of compensation in favour of the petitioner for illegal infringement of his fundamental right to personal liberty,” it stated.
This story was originally published in indianexpress.com. Read the full story here.