| Excluding most police depts from RIA alarms many | |||
|
|||
| Through
a special order in the last week of February, the State Government had
excluded majority of the sections in the Police Department, including
the District Crime Records Bureau, which is the section most accessed
by the public for information, from the Act. |
|||
| Experts point out that the State Government order has no legal validity as the RIA is a Central Act. |
|||
| "The
State Government has no power to issue such an order as the RIA is a
Central Act, and such an Act can only be amended by the Parliament,"
said P Chandrasekharan, former general secretary of People's Union of
Civil Liberties and a senior counsel at the High Court of Kerala. |
|||
| The
Act itself points out that "the information which cannot be denied to
Parliament or a State Legislature shall not be denied to any person." |
|||
| It
only allows, through Section 8 (h), to deny "information which would
impede the progress of investigation or apprehension or prosecution of
offenders." |
|||
| However,
the State Government not only made good use of this exemption but went
beyond that and exempted the police records division and other
sections, leaving only the trivial details of the reserve police in the
State to be accessed by the public. |
|||
| Experts
at law point out that the State Government has only the limited power
of framing the necessary rules for implementing a Central Act and
cannot exempt any department from such Acts, unless the Act itself does
so. |
|||
| Mr
Chandrasekharan said, "The State Government doesn't have the power to
make such a large-scale exclusion. Such exclusion can only be made
through an amendment to the Act in Parliament. |
|||
| "They
can only make exclusions for cases in which giving information will
affect the investigation of a police case or will affect the security,
strategic, scientific or economic interests of the State." |
|||
| The
move by the State Government has cast serious doubts as the State
police often functions as the arm of the ruling party, and the recent
order enables the Government to hide facts from the public in instances
of abuse of power. |
|||
| The
International Advisory Commission of the Commonwealth Human Rights
Initiative (CHRI) had pointed out in its report, titled Police
Accountability: Too Important to Neglect, Too Urgent to Delay, that RIA
is a powerful tool to highlight police excesses but our government
seems to want to avoid just that. |
|||
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"Ours is a battle not for wealth or for power.
It is a battle for freedom. It is a battle for the reclamation of human personality."
- Dr BR Ambedkar
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