1981 (10) TMI 174

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....tion, his advocate, Shri Harjinder Singh, wrote a letter to the Superintendent of Central Jail, Amritsar, enclosing therewith two representations drafted on behalf of the petitioner, one of which was addressed to D the Joint Secretary, Department of Home, Government of Punjab, Chandigarh, and the other to the Secretary, Union Ministry of Finance, Department of Revenue, New 'Delhi. The Jail Superintendent was requested by the aforesaid letter that the representations be forwarded to the State Government and the Central Government after obtaining the signatures of the detenu thereon. The contention of the petitioner is that in spite of the long passage of time, the representation to the Central Government has not so far been considered by....

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....nment. Some one tripped somewhere and the representation addressed to the Central Government was apparently never forwarded to it, with the inevitable result that the detenu has been unaccountably deprived of a valuable right o defend and assert his fundamental right to personal liberty. May be that the detenu is a smuggler whose tribe (and how their numbers increase !) deserves no sympathy since its activities have paralysed the Indian economy. But the laws of preventive detention afford only a modicum of safeguards to persons detained under them and if freedom and liberty are to have any meaning in our democratic set-up, it is essential that at least those safeguards are not denied to the detenus. Section 11 (1) of COFEPOSA confers upon t....