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Across the country, lawyers, scholars, and activists are seeking the release of prisoners on interim bail or emergency parole amid the worst surge of the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.
These voices demand decongestion of overcrowded prisons, ramping up the health and sanitation facilities within prisons, and mitigation of the psychological trauma caused to prisoners from not knowing the fate of their families beyond the prison walls, which gets more severe when lockdown rules kick in.
State has an obligation to protect the right to health of the prisoners. Demands for decongestion of prisons not only seek release of prisoners, but also attention towards the unique needs of those who are vulnerable and marginalised by the virtue of their identity – women, the aged, trans persons, mentally ill, and disabled prisoners.
During the first wave of the pandemic, the judiciary’s approach to decongesting prisons was predominantly “crime-centric”. The decisions of the HPCs had created an “eligibility criteria” for the release of prisoners, which did not take into consideration any other factor, but the “nature of the crime”.
In order to shift the focus of decongesting procedures from “crime” to “public health”, a representation was filed before Delhi’s HPC by advocates Vrinda Grover, Soutik Banerjee, Devika Tulsiani, Mannat Tipnis, and Dr Pratiksha Baxi.
The representation submitted that to protect the right to life of the prison inmates there was an imminent need to adopt a health-centric approach.
Part of having a public-health approach towards decongestion in prisons includes acknowledging these vulnerabilities in formulating the release criteria.
The representation made before Delhi’s HPC also urges special attention towards the unique condition of women and disabled prisoners. It argued that interim bail or emergency parole should be the norm, especially if a person belongs to a vulnerable group, community, or class in society.
On May 03, the Jammu & Kashmir High Court Bar Association (JKHBA) urged the central government and the Union Territory of J&K to pay attention to the pains of incarceration of Kashmiri prisoners.
The Bar wanted the Kashmiri prisoners locked up in jails outside Kashmir to either be shifted to jails in the Kashmir valley or be released on parole.
The demand for acknowledging the vulnerability of various special categories of prisoners has been made across the board. The courts and the HPCs can’t turn a blind eye to this issue, especially when the national and international bodies have all echoed the same demand.
Even international organisations such as the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, World Health Organisation, and UN Office on Drugs and Crime, have urged national governments to decongest prisons and treat pre-trial incarceration as a “method of last resort”.
The HPCs and the courts, therefore, cannot approach the issue of decongesting prisons solely from the crime-centric approach. Doing so, would not only defeat the efforts of curbing the spread of the deadly virus, but would also violate the prisoners’ constitutional right to life.
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Published: 05 May 2021,08:06 PM IST