MADURAI: The Madurai Bench of Madras High Court recently held that only the passport authorities can impound a person’s passport and the trial court cannot impose the surrender of the passport as a bail condition.
Justice P Dhanabal made the observations while setting aside a condition imposed by a Sessions Court in Tiruchy, directing one P Raja of Cuddalore to surrender his passport to the jurisdictional magistrate court to get released on bail.
The judge noted that Raja was arrested in a cheating case registered against him by the Srirangam police in December last year. He initially obtained bail from the above lower court in January.
The next month, he filed a petition seeking relaxation of his bail conditions, following which the lower court modified his conditions, directing him to surrender his passport and not to leave India without prior permission of the court.
Claiming that the above condition to surrender passport violates Article 21 of the Constitution of India, Raja has moved the high court.
The judge observed that as per Section 109 of BNSS, the court has no power to impound a passport.
Moreover, impounding a passport is provided for in Section 10(3) of the Passports Act, which says only competent authorities can take such action. Therefore, impounding of a passport cannot be done by the court under Section 104 CrPC, though it can be used to impound any other document or object.
Citing that the Passports Act is a special law while the CrPC is a general law and it is well settled that the special law prevails over the general law, the judge opined that so far as passport is concerned, the passport authorities alone can impound passport and the trial court while granting bail cannot impose such a condition to deposit the passport.
If at all the court wants to impound passport the same can be done through the concerned authorities, he further held and disposed of the petition.