Kashmiri human rights activist Khurram Parvez was detained on Wednesday for the second time, after a court ordered his release from administrative detention on Tuesday, Amnesty International India said. The organisation's executive director, Aakar Patel, said, “Detaining a person right after he is released, without any intention to charge him or bring him to trial, amounts to using a revolving door of persecution.”
The organisation has called on officials to either release Parvez or prosecute him in a fair trial. It also stressed that he be protected from ill-treatment and given access to family and lawyers.
Parvez was taken into preventive custody on September 15, a day after he was disallowed from boarding a flight from Delhi to Geneva for a United Nations meeting. His wife, Sameena Mir, alleged officers had been waiting outside the jail for him. The reason behind the move has not been ascertained, according to The Indian Express. While no charges against him have been disclosed yet, he was allegedly taken into custody earlier for fear that he "may cause breach of peace".
Parvez's lawyers had submitted that his detention was "illegal" and no show-cause notice had been issued to him for a bail bond, as required by law. Executive Magistrate Mohammad Amin Najar, who had passed the order for the activist's detention, admitted that he had neither issued the notice nor had Parvez been produced before the magistrate, for which he was reprimanded by the court.
As many as 52 activists, scholars, writers and lawyers had written an open letter demanding his immediate release. According to the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, where Parvez is a programme coordinator, Parvez was "orally informed [at the Delhi airport] that immigration officers had instructions that he should not be allowed to leave the country". Laws such as the Jammu and Kashmir Public Safety Act have provisions for citizens to be detained without charge or trial.
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