Justice Bela M Trivedi of the Supreme Court on Tuesday recused herself from hearing a petition filed by Bilkis Bano challenging the Gujarat government’s decision to grant pre-mature release to 11 persons sentenced to life imprisonment for gangrape and murder during the 2002 riots in the western state, Live Law reported.
Bano’s petition came up for hearing before a bench comprising Justice Ajay Rastogi and Justice Trivedi. However, Justice Rastogi said: “List the matter before a bench which one of us is not a part of.”
Justice Trivedi reportedly recused herself as she had been deputed as the law secretary in the Gujarat government from 2004 to 2006, according to Live Law.
The 11 men had gangraped Bano in a village near Ahmedabad on March 3, 2002 during the communal riots in Gujarat. She was 19 and pregnant at the time. Fourteen members of her family were also killed in the violence, including her three-year-old daughter whose head was smashed on the ground by the perpetrators.
The men were freed on August 15 from a Godhra jail after the Gujarat government approved their application under its remission policy.
In May, a bench of the Supreme Court headed by Justice Rastogi had held that the Gujarat government had the jurisdiction to decide on remission as the crime took place in that state. It overturned the verdict of the Gujarat High Court that the Maharashtra government had the authority to decide on remission, as the trial was held in Mumbai.
In her petition, Bano argued that given the provisions of the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Maharashtra government should have heard the remission application.
Bano also said that convict Radheshyam Bhagwandas Shah, in his remission plea, did not disclose the nature of his crime to mislead the court to get a favourable order. The Supreme Court had ordered the Gujarat government to consider releasing the convicts on Shah’s plea.
Shah “cleverly concealed” the name of prosecutrix Bilkis Bano, which is to date considered a synonym of the brutality of Gujarat Riots, she argued.
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