50 percent Unlawful Activities Prevention Act cases fell flat in 2014-18
NEW DELHI: More than 50 percent of the total cases tried under the anti-terror law Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA), which was invoked recently to arrest the activist Umar Khalid in Delhi riots cases, have resulted in acquittals, analysis of data from the year 2014-2018 shows.An analysis of data available for these five years with the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) by this newspaper showed the conviction rate under UAPA cases has remained below the halfway mark. It was lowest in 2015 when only 14.5% of the total trials resulted in conviction and the highest in 2017, when 49.3% of the total cases disposed of ended in conviction. In 2018, the conviction rate was 27.2%.
The UAPA has been invoked against activists arrested in the Elgar Parishad-Bhima Koregaon case, against at least two journalists in Kashmir and against many activists in the Delhi riots cases. Uttar Pradesh registered a steep rise in UAPA cases in 2017, the year when Yogi Adityanath government came to power. In 2016, the state registered 10 UAPA cases. The following year it recorded a ten-fold increase, with 109 cases filed. There was a marginal dip in 2018 with 107 cases.
In the five-year period, cases filed under UAPA saw a consistent increase in Jammu and Kashmir. From 45 cases in 2014, J&K had 245 cases in 2018. In contrast, there was a constant dip in cases filed under this law in Manipur. Goa, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Odisha, Rajasthan, Sikkim, Telangana, Tripura, Odisha and West Bengal did not register any cases under UAPA in 2018. The 2018 NCRB report also stated that 3,920 UAPA cases were pending investigation from previous years, five cases were reopened and fresh 1,182 cases were reported.
Under UAPA, the maximum stipulated timeframe for filing a charge sheet is 90 days, which may be extended by the court to 180 days. The 2019 Watali judgment of the Supreme Court made securing bail under UAPA all the more difficult. Onerous bail conditions can effectively put the accused under many years of incarceration without trial. While 317 charge sheets were filed under UAPA in 2018, police took 1-2 years to file the charge sheets in over 16 per cent cases. In 10 cases, the charge sheets were filed more than two years after the cases were registered.