High Court Bench asks police to use e-post to inform relatives of arrest
Written By Admin on August 20, 2014 | Wednesday, August 20, 2014
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Telephone calls won’t do, says judge
The Madras High Court Bench here has disapproved of the police practice of informing relatives or friends of the arrest of an individual on the phone and making an endorsement to that effect in the arrest memo.
Disposing of a contempt of court application, Justice N. Kirubakaran
said that passing on information on the phone was not desirable since it
became difficult to prove whether or not the relatives or friends were
informed.
The judge agreed with R. Gandhi, counsel for the applicant, that
since the Centre had discontinued telegraph service since July 15 last
year, the best option available to the police was to use e-post being
offered by the Department of Posts. He expressed displeasure with police
officers using phones to intimate the family of those arrested in
criminal cases despite a ban imposed on the practice by a Division Bench
in the Principal Seat of the High Court on August 29 last.
In the present case, the applicant, K.S. Anwar alias Syed Anwar,
claimed that a Sub-Inspector, attached to the Central Crime Branch here,
did not follow any of the 11 directions issued by the Supreme Court in
D.K. Basu’s case in 1997 while arresting him on June 25.
One of the directions states that police officers should prepare a
memo of arrest containing the date and time of arrest and get it
attested by at least one witness, who may either be a family member of
the arrested or a respectable person of the locality where the arrest is
made. The other directions state that the police should notify, as soon
as practicable, the next friend or relative of the arrested of the time
and place of arrest and the venue of custody through telegraph, besides
sensitising the arrested to his right to have someone informed.
However, in the arrest memo pertaining to the applicant, the
Sub-Inspector had just mentioned a phone number and recorded that the
applicant’s wife had been informed of the arrest on that number. Such a
practice could not be entertained, the judge said.
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