TC – ARTEMIS

LAW COLLEGE DEHRADUN,

UTTARANCHAL UNIVERSITY

SHUSHILA DEVI INTRAMURAL

MOOT COURT COMPETITION, 2020

BEFORE THE HON’BLE SUPREME COURT OF INDUS

RAMAN…………………………………………...…PETITIONER

V.

UNION OF INDUS………………..…………………RESPONDENT

PETITION HAS INVOKED ARTICLE 32 OF THE CONSTITUTION OF INDUS

UPON SUBMISSION OF THE HON’BLE CHIEF JUSTICE AND HIS LORDSHIP’S

COMPANION JUSTICE OF THE HON’BLE SUPREME COURT OF INDUS
 TABLE OF CONTENT

1. LIST OF ABRREVIATION
2. INDEX OF AUTHORTITIES
3. STATEMENT OF JURISDICTION
4. STATEMENT OF FACTS
5. STATEMENT OF ISSUES
6. SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT
7. ARGUMENTS ADVANCE
ISSUE 1 – WHETHER THE PRESENT PETITION IS MAINTAINABLE?
ISSUE 2 – WHETHER RTI AMENDMENT ACT, 2017 IS UNCONSTITIONAL?
ISSUE 3 – WHETHER THE UAP AMENEDMENT ACT, 2017 IS
UNCONTITUTIONAL?
8. PRAYER
 LIST OF ABBEREVIATION

1. Govt. government
2. RTI ACT Right to Information Act
3. UAP ACT unlawful activities prevention act
4. PIL public interest litigation
5. FR fundamental rights
6. Eg. Example
7. V. verses
8. ART. Article
9. Sec. section
10. SC supreme court
11. Aug. august
12. ECI election commission of India
13. HC high court
14. J. justice
15. Mohd. Mohammad
16. IIT Indian institute of technology
17. SIM subscriber identification module
18. CCTV closed circuit television
 INDEX OF AUTHORITIES

1. The Right to Information Act, 2017

2. The Constitution of India, 1950

3. The Unlawful Activity prevention Amendment Act, 2017

 STATEMENT OF JURISDICTION

The supreme court has no jurisdiction over the present matter.

 STATEMENT OF FACTS

1. Indus is the world’s largest democratic country accompanied by the world’s most detailed
Constitution. The country is run according to the parliamentary form of government, where
Executive is derived from the Legislature. Separation of Judiciary is demarcated as a
Constitutional objective. Governments, in the course of the last seven decades of independence,
have emphasized on the safety of the citizens from anarchist elements. In the wake of several
terrorist attacks that the country has faced, various anti-terrorism laws have been enacted and
amended from time-to-time.

2. The Parliament, in the recent years (2016-present) has enacted and amended many citizen
centric laws, viz. the Citizenship Act, 1955, the Right to Information Act, 2005 and the
Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967. The amended Acts of the Right to Information Act
and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act are hereby attached as Annexures I and II
respectively. These enactments have received mixed responses from the Indus citizenry.

3. Mohd. Irfan, a citizen of Indus, runs a telecommunication shop in the capital city, Deliah.
His shop was located near the Indus Institute of Technology (IIT), where he sells SIM cards
and repairs computers & other electronic devices. A bulk of his customers are the students of
IIT. One of them, Raman, a research scholar at IIT, was one of his regular customers and with
the passage of time, they became good friends. Both of them had been residents of the capital
city for the preceding five (5) years.

4. Raman has always been very vocal in putting forth his opinions on the local administration
as well as various government policies—of the State and the Centre, and was generally
accompanied by Irfan in his demonstrations, et cetera. Both of them have been arrested on
previous occasions in the course of their protest rallies and other instances. They consequently
gained an image of ‘revolutionaries’ in the eyes of the general public in the capital city.

5. On November 24, 2018, a bomb blast occurred in Karampur, 25 km from the boundaries of
Deliah. The bomb blast didn’t claim any lives but resulted in destruction of a lot of public
property. A few people who were nearby were injured as well. The central investigating
agencies (eg. the National Investigative Agencies), along with local police, immediately started
investigating the matter. At a point in their investigation, in a CCTV footage near the IIT, one
of the five arrested suspects, who were in custody, was seen buying a SIM Card from Irfan’s
shop, 3 days before the blast.

6. On December 2, 2018, police reached Irfan’s shop to investigate and the police found out
that 14 SIM cards sold by him, in the course of the last month, were based on fake documents.
Irfan was arrested and detained for investigation. After a few weeks, he was declared as a
‘terrorist’ by the Central Government under Section 35 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention)
Act—as amended in 2017.

7. When Raman came to know about this, he filed an RTI Application under the Right to
Information Act, 2005 [hereinafter “the RTI Act”], requesting the grounds on which Irfan was
declared as a terrorist. This request was denied by the Central Public Information Officer on
the grounds that ‘it will prejudicially affect the security interests of the State’. After receiving
no updates regarding the trial proceedings of Irfan in the upcoming months as well, he again
filed an application under the RTI Act. His application was received by a different (appointed
a month before the receipt of this application) Information Officer this time, who informed him
that there was little to no paperwork in the arrest of Mohd. Irfan, and there was no liability on
the Government to disclose grounds for such a declaration. Raman, on receiving this
information, created a hue and cry on social media and other platforms, about the indefinite
detention of his friend and dubbed the anti-terror law as ‘archaic’ and ‘against the principles of
international human rights’.

8. Following the massive uproar, the Commissioner who supplied the information to Raman
was terminated from service, within 10 months of his appointment.

9. In the meantime, several other RTIs were filed by public-spirited citizens. One such RTI was
filed where a person asked about the total travel expenses of the Cabinet Ministers, including
the Prime Minister for one of his campaigns, the Swadeshi movement of the 21st century:
‘Make in Indus’. The Chief Information Commissioner who disseminated this information, was
allegedly removed from service. Similar incidents of the like nature kept occurring in the
upcoming months.

10. In the wake of these events, Raman approached Supreme Court and filed a Public Interest
Litigation, seeking direction to declare The Right to Information (Amendment) Act, 2017 and
The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Amendment Act, 2017 as unconstitutional—the former
being violative of Article 19 of the Constitution, and the latter being violative of Articles 14,
19 and 21 of the Constitution of Indus. Also, a non-governmental organization (NGO) named
Aazadi, also filed a petition challenging the UAP (Amendment) Act, 2017 on grounds of
violating the federal structure of the Constitution.

11. The aforementioned petitions were clubbed by the Supreme Court and hearing is scheduled.
 STATEMENT OF ISSUES

Issue 1

Whether the present petition is maintainable?

Issue 2

Whether the Right To Information(Amendment)Act,2017

is unconstitutional?

Issue 3

Whether the unlawful activities (prevention)Amendment

Act, 2017 is unconstitutional?
 SUMMARY OF ARGUMENT

ISSUE 1 – WHETHER THE PRESENT PETITION IS MAINTANBLE?

It is hereby submitted on behalf of the respondent, it is humbly submitted before this hon’ble
court that the present petition which invokes art.32 of the Indian Constitution is not
maintainable because the petition is foiled to waste the time of the court and the matter raised
by the worthy opponent is abrupt.

ISSUE2 – WHETHER THE RTI AMENDMENT ACT, 2017 IS UNCONSTIUTIONAL?

It is hereby submitted on behalf of the respondent that the RTI Amendment Act, 2017 is passed
by the worthy govt. in order to fix the system of the transparency and to enhance the governance
of the democratic govt. and also its accountability and responsibility.

ISSUE 3 – WHETHER THE UAPA ACT,2017 IS UNCONSTITUTIONAL ?

The amendment to the UAP act, aims to the same objective as the act which to prevent the
activities against the integrity and the sovereignty of India and also to prevent terrorism and
therefore, the amendment is constitutional
 ARGUMENTS ADVANCE
ISSUE 1
WHETHER THE PRESENT PETITION IS MAINTAINABLE ?
Pointing out that Public Interest Litigation at the instance of a third party to a civil dispute is
not maintainable, the Madras high court has dismissed with cost, a PIL, which sought a
direction to the authorities to withdraw the permission granted for running the Good Shepherd
Matriculation School in Ayappakam village, Chennai.

A division bench comprising Justices [Link] and Subramonium Prasad dismissed the
PIL filed by [Link] and imposed a cost of Rs 5,000 to be paid by the petitioner to Juvenile
Justice Fund, Director of Social Defence, Ministry of Social Welfare, Government of Tamil
Nadu.

In the last few years, there have been serious concerns about the use and misuse of public
interest litigations and these concerns have been expressed at various levels. The time has come
for a serious re-examination of the misuse of public interest litigation. There are numerous
cases in the history of law where PIL has been misused. As in the case of Shubhash Kumar V
state of Bihar. In this case there was a prole who was fired by the director of the company so
he filed a PIL that this company is acting something wrong so this should be tried. So in this
case by the fact of the case we can see that this is purely misuse of PIL nothing else. As same
in the case of S.P. Gupta V Union Of India. There was also misuse of PIL came into picture. as
per as in the case of Sheela Barse v. State of Maharashtra [(1983) 2 SCC 96]: In this case, on
receiving a letter from the petitioner, a journalist, the Supreme Court took notice of the
complaint of custodial violence to women prisoners in the lock-up in the city of Bombay. The
court issued various directions which included the following: “Four or five police lock-ups
should be selected in reasonably good localities where only female suspects should be kept and
they should be guarded by female constables”. This misuse comes in various forms. The first
is what Justice Pasayat in the case of Ashok Kumar Pandey v. State of W.B. Described as
“busybodies, meddlesome interlopers, wayfarers or officious interveners who approach the
court with extraneous motivation or for glare of publicity”. Such litigation is described as
“publicity interest litigation” and the courts have been fraught with such litigation. How else
would one describe a public interest litigation filed for “reliefs” such as that the higher judiciary
would be provided with private planes and special transport? A petition to this effect was filed
by a lawyer practicing in U.P. As could be expected, it was summarily rejected, but not before
the gentleman had his day in the sun, however momentary it was. Examples of this kind of
litigation are innumerable. No sooner has an event of public interest or concern occurred than
there is a race to convert the issue into a PIL.

Cautioning the High Courts on the misuse of the PIL, the Bench said “PIL is a weapon which
has to be used with great care and circumspection and the judiciary has to be extremely careful
to see that behind the beautiful veil of public interest an ugly private malice, vested interest
and/or publicity seeking is not lurking”. The Bench made it clear that a PIL should be aimed at
redressal of genuine public wrong or public injury and not publicity oriented or founded on
personal vendetta. It observed that it should not be allowed to become “publicity interest
litigation or private interest litigation or politics interest litigation or, the latest trend, praise
income litigation. The laudable concept of PIL was for extending the long arm of sympathy to
the poor, ignorant and oppressed”, the Bench said and added the “brand name” should not be
allowed to be used by imposters and meddlesome interlopers impersonating as public-spirited
holy men.

In the case of Chhetriya pradushan sangarsh samiti v state of U.P the jhunjhunwala mills
purchased a land form the member of samiti long back because increasing land prices the heirs
of the persons, who sold the property asked to return it when they could not succeed in that
they started launching criminal offence complaints and that the that mills polluting the
environment. SC held that samiti has not come with clean intention and hence PIL cannot be
entertained. Because of those cases, the SC laid down certain condition for PIL.

Secondly in sheela barse v union of India no PIL to protect the interest of criminals be filed.

In S.P. Gupta v union of India P.N. Bhagwati in the instant case lays down certain specific case
where PIL cannot be entertained namely.

1. In the person is engaged in socio- economic crime then there is no PIL.

2. If offence is against the woman, no PIL should be filed on behalf of the criminal.
Issue 2 :
Whether the Right To Information(Amendment)Act,2017 is
unconstitutional ?

The Right to Information Act, which was passed in 2005, enables ordinary citizens to access
information relating to government work, which officials might otherwise hide. The
information commissioners are the final authority on whether governments must disclose
information that had been sought by RTI applicants. The law provided them a fixed term of
five years and salaries equivalent to their counterparts in the ECI.

But the amendment allows the Central government to control the tenure, salaries and other
terms of services of information commissioners both at the Centre and in states.

Transparency activists say this undermines the independence of the information

commissioners, which is critical for the effective functioning of the law – only an independent
commissioner will be able to take decisions against the government in the public interest.

Defending the amendment, the government in a Press Information Bureo release on July 19
said linking the terms of the information commission to those of the election commission was
an “anomaly which needs to be corrected” because the election commission is a Constitutional
body while the information commission, formed under the Right to Information Act, is a
statutory one.

Statutory bodies are established after a law is enacted in Parliament, while Constitutional bodies
find mention in the Constitution or are created after a Constitutional amendment is passed.

Former information commissioners say this distinction is merely a ruse to undermine the RTI
Act. They point out that officials in all statutory bodies follow the fixed terms mentioned in
their Acts.

“The rationale behind [the amendment] is to reduce the stature of the information
commissioners,” said MM Ansari, who served as the central information commissioner from
2005 till 2010. “Public authorities will now feel emboldened to not disclose information and
the information commissioners will not be able to summon them to hold them accountable.”
Issue 3

Whether the Unlawful Activities(Prevention)Amendment Act,

2017 is unconstitutional ?

Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, (‘Act’) is meant to outlaw and penalize unlawful and
terrorist activities, which pose a threat to the integrity and sovereignty of India. It also provides
wide-ranging powers to the Central Government to designate organizations as terrorist
organizations and also prescribes the penalties for taking part in the activities of such
organizations.

In 2019, the Parliament carried out certain amendments to the Act (‘Amendment’) and the same
was notified on 8 Aug. The most significant change brought about by the Amendment was that
it altered Sec. 35 and gave the Central Government the power to notify an individual as a
‘terrorist’ under Schedule IV of the Act. Prior to the Amendment, only organizations could
have been designated this way and individuals were not covered.

Detractors of the Amendment argue that it gives arbitrary powers to the executive and violates
an individual’s right to due process of law, right to dissent, and right to reputation. Two separate
petitions were filed in the Supreme Court challenging the constitutional validity of the
Amendment on the above grounds. These petitions were tagged by the Court and on 7
September 2019, the Court issued notice to the Union Government. ON August 14, the
Government of India notified amendments to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act
(UAPA), 1967, empowering itself to designate individuals as “terrorists” without providing
them any effective redress. The sheer brazenness of these changes attracted considerable
attention. Two constitutional challenges were filed before the Supreme Court within a few
weeks. The constitutional issues raised are not entirely new since the amendments extend the
existing provisions for organisations to individuals. In doing so, the amendments in fact
prescribe no new procedure or consequence for individuals designated as “terrorists”, throwing
up troubling questions about their purpose.
Under provisions imported from the Prevention of Terrorism Act (POTA) on its repeal in 2004,
the UAPA empowered the government to ban organisations branded as “terrorist”. The
government merely has to “believe” that the organisation is “involved in terrorism”, which is
circularly defined as participating in terrorist acts, promoting terrorism, or being “otherwise
involved in terrorism”. Once such a notification is issued, the organisation’s first remedy is to
appeal to the Central government, the very entity that banned it. If its application is rejected,
its only recourse under the UAPA is to appeal to a review committee, which neither has to
disclose its reasoning nor decide on the application within any time limit.

With the 2019 amendment, the same provisions now apply directly to individuals. But while
declaring an organisation as “terrorist” creates an array of criminal offences—from
membership of an organisation to helping arrange meetings where a member of an organisation
is speaking—declaring an individual a “terrorist” creates no new offence or punishment. What
difference the designation makes to that person’s life or the government’s ability to prosecute
him/her is left completely unsaid.

This is no doubt a disturbing lacuna, and potential explanations are equally worrisome. The
amendment Bill, like several other Bills passed in the same session, was introduced and passed
soon after without wide public consultation and scrutiny by a select committee. The Bill’s
silence about its consequences could thus be a result of hasty drafting, which would, of course,
be a gross dereliction of parliamentary duty in a matter impacting fundamental procedural
rights. Or the silence could be intended, raising concerns that the amendment may enable courts
to further read down rights while interpreting the other provisions of the UAPA.

For instance, the UAPA criminalises voluntarily harbouring a person after knowing that that
person is a terrorist. If a person is designated as “terrorist”, would this allow courts to presume
that others now “know” that he/she is a terrorist, and maintain charges against persons close to
him/her, irrespective of how legitimate the designation is? Further, under the Act, “proceeds of
terrorism” include property intended to be used “for the purpose of an individual terrorist”.
Such property can be forfeited to the government regardless of who owns it and whether the
“terrorist” has been prosecuted. Would the designation as terrorist thus allow the property of
an individual, and those in her proximity, to be taken away merely on that ground?

The true cause for concern about the amendment, hence, may lie in how it interacts with older
provisions, which anyway grant the government extensive powers to prosecute a wide spectrum
of individuals. To begin with, the definition of “terrorist act” encompasses far more than what
is suggested in international instruments. An act that is committed using “means of whatever
nature” and is likely to threaten India’s integrity or security—which could mean fiscal stability
or even something as vague as “livelihood security”—would fall within the definition of a
terrorist act. This allows the government ample room to prosecute even constitutionally
protected activity: criticism of the state can be termed an act “likely to threaten” India’s
sovereignty, and “means of whatever nature” has included pamphlets.

PRAYER
Wherefore in the light of the issue raised, arguments advanced and authorities cited, it is
humbly requested that this Hon’ble Court may be pleased to:

• the present petition is not maintainable

• the amendment act of 2017 to the RTI act, 2005 is constitutional.
• the UAPA Act, 2017 is constitutional.

AND/OR

Pass any other order that this Hon’ble Court of Sessions may deem fit in the interest of
Justice, Equity and Good conscience.
And for this, the Defence as in duty bound, shall humbly pray.