Lack of records slows progress
The government law officers may not be able to meet the deadline of July 15 for filing of the “curative” petition in the Supreme Court in the Bhopal gas tragedy case due to lack of records.
The government is understood to have given a deadline of July 15 to the law officers to file the curative petition in an effort to revive the charge of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder” against seven former top officials of Union Carbide India Ltd, given a light sentence of two years by a Bhopal court.
“The government has made most of the records available with it to the office of the attorney-general (AG) but they are not complete. Some documents are being retrieved from the Supreme Court archive but the same had not yet been located,” sources said.
“Complete records are not yet available. Some records are missing and attempts are being made to trace them,” the sources said.
Even doubts are being raised whether missing records had anything to do with a fire incident in Supreme Courts some years ago, but the top court officials are not sure about it.
The law officers do not want to leave anything to chance considering the fact that the “curative” petition is being filed after 14 years in a bid to review the 1996 judgment of a bench of Justices A.M. Ahamadi and S.B. Majmudar, converting charge of “culpable homicide not amounting to murder” under Section 304-II of the IPC into the charge of “death due to negligence” listed in Section 304-A.
Since the scope of curative petition is “very limited” as a case can only be reviewed if there was any “error of law or fact” in the verdict, the government law officers, led by attorney-general G.E. Vahanvati, have to convince the top court that the charges against seven UCIL officials were “wrongly” diluted.
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