New Delhi: The Gauhati high court has selected an additional panel of 221 members to head foreigners’ tribunals (FTs) in Assam barely ten days before the final National Register of Citizens (NRC) is to be published.
Following a Supreme Court directive, the office of the Registrar General of India will publish the final NRC on August 31. The final draft, released in July 2018, had left out 40,07007 applicants, of whom nearly 31 lakh reapplied.
With the latest selection of members, the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), as stated in its affidavit to the apex court, will be able to put in place 200 FTs by the time the final NRC is published. Those left out of the final NRC will not lose their citizenship right away but will have to take the tribunal route to prove their claim. Even if a tribunal declares them a foreigner, they have will still have the option of going to the high courts for relief.
This July, the government told the apex court that it planned to establish 1,000 tribunals in a phase-wise manner, “within two years” in the state.
Aside from handling the cases of applicants left out of the NRC, the tribunals — quasi-judicial bodies set up under the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964 — will continue taking up cases of “D” or doubtful voters.
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Doubtful voters are a category created exclusively for Assam by the Election Commission of India in the late 1990s. Their names had been taken off electoral rolls. To regain voting rights, doubtful voters have to present before the tribunals through their legal counsel documents which can prove that they had come to Assam before the citizenship cut-off date decided by the government as per the Assam Accord of 1985.
So far, 100 tribunals have been functional in the state. They handle cases of suspected foreigners. However, in mid 2017, the terms of as many as 19 members were not renewed by the government, which reportedly cited that their performances “were not up to the mark.” The latest selection will most likely fill the existing gap of 19 members too.
As per a notification issued by the high court on August 19, the latest panel of members includes retired judicial officers, advocates and civil servants, selected on the basis of merit. These officials had responded to an advertisement put out by the court authorities on June 10.
While earlier only retired judges and advocates within 55 years of age and with a minimum of 10 years of experience were eligible to apply for the post of FT members, the court in its latest advertisement sought “retired judicial officers of Assam Judicial Service, retired civil servants (not below the rank of secretary and additional secretary) with judicial experience, or advocates not below the age of 35 with at least seven years of practice.”
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The applicants were called for an interview between July 16 and August 11.
The notification said 50 applicants have been kept on a waiting list.
News reports quoted officials in the home and police departments of the state, both headed by chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal, as having said that the news members would be allocated tribunals in six districts. “Kamrup (Metropolitan) district, which covers Guwahati and outskirts, would get 67 of these, followed by Nagaon with 39, Jorhat 31, Bongaigaon 22, Sonitpur 21, and Cachar 20,” reported The Hindu.
Foreigners Tribunals have been operational in the state since 1964. According to a white paper published by the state government in 2012, from four, the number of tribunals went up to nine in 1968. After 1983, 11 tribunals were set up under the Illegal Migrants (Determination) Act. The number went up to 36 after the Supreme Court scrapped the Act in 2005 and brought the tribunals under the Foreigners Act, 1946.
In 2014, as per a Supreme Court directive, the number was raised to 100 in order to handle lakhs of pending cases of suspected foreigners.