- NET Web Desk
The Supreme Court on Thursday agreed to hear pleas of two advocates and a journalist booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) for disseminating information about the communal violence in Tripura.
Advocates – Mukesh and Ansarul Haq, and Newsclick journalist Shyam Meera Singh have been booked under the IPC & UAPA provisions at the West Agartala Police Station for bringing out facts on the communal dispute.
A bench comprising Chief Justice N V Ramana and Justices A S Bopanna and Hima Kohli was informed by advocate Prashant Bhushan that two advocates & a journalist had gone to Tripura for a fact-finding mission.
The advocates through their plea, mentioned that UAPA was invoked against them “to suppress” their “fact-finding report” titled “Humanity Under Attack in Tripura #Muslim Lives Matter”.
Meanwhile, Shyam Meera Singh, a journalist with Newsclick, said UAPA was invoked against him for “merely tweeting (that) ‘Tripura is burning’.”
“If the state is allowed to criminalise the very act of fact-finding and reporting — and that too under the stringent provisions of the UAPA in which anticipatory bail is barred and the idea of bail is a remote possibility — then the only facts that will come in the public domain are those that are convenient to the state due to the ‘chilling effect’ on the freedom of speech and expression of members of civil society,” – added the report.
Recently, the Tripura Police booked 102 social media accounts for circulating fake news, intending to escalate communal tensions across the state.
