Srinagar
In Indian illegally occupied Jammu and Kashmir, the spokesman of High Court Bar Association, Ghulam Nabi Shaheen, has said that judges in the territory have stopped acting independently since the August 2019 clampdown imposed by the Indian government.
Ghulam Nabi Shaheen said this while reacting to the reports that a principal sessions judge in Srinagar has passed an order complaining that a high court judge obstructed him from granting bail to an individual, raising questions over the judiciary’s functioning in IIOJK post-August 05, 2019.
In the order, judge Abdul Rashid Malik recused himself from hearing a plea for anticipatory bail from a Srinagar resident Sheikh Salman, saying Justice Javid Iqbal Wani had directed him, through a phone call by his secretary, not to grant bail to Sheikh.
Ghulam Nabi Shaheen in a media interview in Srinagar said, the judges function at the dictation of unseen forces in IIOJK. He said out of hundreds of habeas corpus petitions, the judges have taken up only a few.—KMS
