New Delhi:
An indictment filed by an investigative firm is not a public document, the Supreme Court said on Friday. Making it public violates the rights of both the victim and the accused.
The Supreme Court made the remarks while hearing a plea from journalist Saurav Das seeking free public access to indictment forms and final reports filed under Section 173 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973.
“If the waiver as prayed in the current petition is granted and all charge forms and relevant documents produced along with the charge forms are placed in the public domain or on the websites of the state governments, it will be in violation of the Regulations of the Code of Criminal Procedure and as such may violate the rights of both the accused and the victim and/or even the investigating authority.
“Posting the FIR on the website cannot be equated with posting the indictment forms along with the relevant documents in the public domain and on the websites of the state governments,” said a court judge MR Shah and CT Ravikumar.
The highest court rejected the PIL for lack of merit. The Supreme Court noted orally that if FIRs are given to those unrelated to the case, such as busybodies and NGOs, they could be misused.
Lawyer Prashant Bhushan argued that it is the duty of every government agency to release that information suo motu (of its own accord). Bhushan argued that while the Supreme Court’s instruction to the police to publish copies of FIRs on their websites has brought transparency to the workings of the criminal justice system, the logic of disclosure applies more strongly to charge forms as they are filed after thorough investigation.
An indictment is a report prepared by investigative or law enforcement agencies to prove the charge of a crime. Once the indictment form has been filed with a court, the prosecution proceedings against the accused begin.
According to Article 207 CrPC, the Investigation Office is obliged to provide the copies of the indictment form together with the relevant documents on which the Prosecutor may rely, to the accused and to no one else.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by DailyExpertNews staff and is being published from a syndicated feed.)
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