Taking suo motu cognisance of a report that appeared in TOI on March 20, the Uttarakhand
high court on Tuesday asked the state government to submit a reply on
how 42 minors came to be lodged in jails in the state. The state has
been asked to file a response in the matter by March 26. Although some
of the minors may since have become adults, they were children at the
time they were lodged in jail.
The case was taken up by the divisional bench of Chief Justice KM Joseph and Justice VK Bisht.
The State Commission for the Protection of Child Rights (SCPCR) had
identified 42 children in a 2013 report and said that all of them had
been kept in jails meant for adults even though at the time of the crime
they had not attained 18 years of age.
Ajay Setia, then chairman of SCPCR, conducted inspections in all state
jails and highlighted these facts in a report by the panel.
"I
welcome the decision of the HC. It is a very good step, though it comes a
little late," said Ajay Setia, whose term ended in December last year.
The position of SCPCR chairman has since been vacant.
Under
the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2000, a
minor convicted of crime should be sent to a juvenile home, not a normal
jail. Of the 42 children found lodged in jails, the largest number, 14,
were in Sudhowala jail in Dehradun district; eight were in Roorkee; 12
in Haldwani; four in Haridwar and four in Pauri.
In November
last year, Ajay Setia had written a letter in the matter to the state
governor, chief minister and Chief Justice of the Uttarakhand high
court.
Social activist Jaswant Jangpangi of Didihaat,
Pithoragarh district, on October 29 last year, had written to the SCPCR
chairman saying two inmates of Haridwar jail, Gagan Singh, born in 1990,
and Jagat Singh, born in 1992, were convicted of murder in 2005 and
sent to jail, when both of them were teenagers.
The central
cabinet, however, in August last year, approved a proposal to amend the
Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act to treat those
aged between 16 and 18 years as adults in case they were found involved
in heinous crimes. The amendment came in the wake of the nationwide
debate triggered by the Nirbhaya gang-rape of December 16, 2012 in
Delhi, in which the most brutal of the rapists was a minor at the time
of the crime.