New Delhi: Nikhil Gupta, the Indian citizen indicted by federal prosecutors in the United States for plotting to assassinate a Sikh American at the behest of an Indian government official, approached the Supreme Court of India against his arrest and ongoing extradition proceedings in the Czech Republic. The court on Friday (December 15) posted the petition for hearing on January 4, 2024.
Gupta’s petition was listed before a bench of Justices Sanjiv Khanna and S.V. Bhatti, Bar and Bench reported.
In court, the bench told Gupta’s lawyer that he needs to approach a Czech court on this. “You have to go before the court which is outside India. Go over there. We are not going to have an adjudication over here. The person detained has not given the affidavit. If there is violation of any law etc you have to go to court over there,” the bench said.
Senior advocate C. Aryama Sundaram, appearing on behalf of the petitioner, said that the plea has been filed by a family member of Gupta’s. According to LiveLaw, Sundaram argued that he is only pressing the relief for adequate consular assistance. “This is an extremely sensitive matter for any Ministry to come in. It’s for them to decide,” Justice Khanna responded.
Sundaram has also asked for an in-chamber hearing, and Justice Khanna said the request would be considered at the next hearing.
The petition claims that Gupta had been “illegally detained” in the Czech Republic. “The circumstances surrounding his arrest were marked by irregularities, with no formal arrest warrant presented, and the apprehension executed by self-claimed US agents rather than local Czech authorities,” the plea said.
The plea also claimed that Gupta is a devout Hindu and a vegetarian, but was “forced to consume beef and pork” while in custody in the Czech Republic, Livelaw reported. He also alleged that he was denied consular access, the right to contact his family in India, and the freedom to seek legal representation.
Earlier, The Wire‘s Devirupa Mitra had reported that Gupta had appealed a Prague court’s order allowing his extradition to the US.
On November 29, US federal prosecutors announced that they had charged Gupta with ‘murder for hire’ and ‘conspiracy’ in the ultimately failed plot to kill a Sikh activist in New York. The filed charges accused an unnamed but “identified Indian government official” of recruiting Gupta to hire a ‘hitman’. The ‘hitman’ that Gupta thought he was hiring was actually an undercover US law enforcement officer.
The target was also unnamed in the court documents but was identified by media reports as Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, general counsel for the Sikhs for Justice, a Khalistan advocacy group that is proscribed in India. Pannun is a US citizen who also holds Canadian nationality.
Gupta was arrested in Prague at the request of the US authorities when he arrived there from India on June 30, 2023.
The Czech ministry of justice spokesperson Vladimir Řepka told The Wire that the municipal court in Prague had issued an order on November 23 on the admissibility of the extradition order to the United States. “However, the decision of the municipal court is not yet in legal force.”
When asked for the reason for the delay in implementing the order, he said, “Mr Gupta lodged a complaint (i.e. an ordinary remedy) against the decision of the municipal court in Prague on the admissibility of extradition.”
The next step would be a referral to the high court for a decision on the complaint by Gupta. “The high court in Prague shall either dismiss the complaint and thus uphold the decision of the municipal court, revoke the challenged decision and refer the case back to the municipal court in Prague for a new hearing, or change the decision and rule on the inadmissibility of the extradition,” said Repka.