Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination (Topic: A Declared Foreigner and Foreigners' Tribunal)

Brain Booster for UPSC & State PCS Examination

A Declared Foreigner and Foreigners' Tribunal

Siddeque Ali became the last to be released from the only detention centre in Barak Valley as the beneficiary of a Supreme Court order.

A declared foreigner(DF) is a person marked by any of the 100 Foreigners’ Tribunals (FTs) in Assam for allegedly failing to prove their citizenship after the State police’s Border wing marks him or her as an illegal immigrant.

The 1964 order on Constitution of Tribunals said: “The Central Government may by order, refer the question as to whether a person is not a foreigner within meaning of the Foreigners Act, 1946 (31 of 1946) to a Tribunal to be constituted for the purpose, for its opinion.”
The MHA has amended the Foreigners (Tribunals) Order, 1964, and has empowered district magistrates in all States and Union Territories to set up tribunals to decide whether a person staying illegally in India is a foreigner or not.
Earlier, the powers to constitute tribunals were vested only with the Centre.
The tribunals are quasi-judicial bodies, unique to Assam, to determine if a person staying illegally is a “foreigner” or not.
In other parts, once a ‘foreigner’ has been apprehended by the police for staying illegally, he or she is produced before a local court under the Passport Act, 1920, or the Foreigners Act, 1946, with the punishment ranging three months to eight years in jail.
Once the accused have served the sentence, the court orders their deportation, and they are moved to detention centres till the country of origin accepts them.

Each FT member is appointed under the Foreigners Tribunal Act, 1941, and Foreigners Tribunal Order, 1984, as per the guidelines issued by the government from time to time.
A member can be a retired judicial officer of the Assam Judicial Service, a retired civil servant not below the rank of secretary and additional secretary with judicial experience, or a practising advocate not below the age of 35 years and with at least seven years of practice.
A member is also required to have a fair knowledge of the official languages of Assam (Assamese, Bengali, Bodo and English) as well as be conversant with the historical background to the foreigners’ issue.

The amended Foreigners (Tribunal) Order, 2019 empowers individuals to approach the Tribunals.
Earlier only the State administration could move the Tribunal against a suspect, but with the final National Register of Citizen (NRC) about to be published and to give adequate opportunity to those not included, this has been done. If a person doesn’t find his or her name in the final list, they could move the Tribunal.

Extreme urgency in the matter is that the lives of such detenues are at risk in light of coronavirus or COVID-19 due to densely populated detention camps.
Many of those excluded are illiterate and poor, and some are victims of a spelling error in their names or a mistake in their age in documents offered for proof of citizenship.
Detention of such persons indefinitely where there is no possibility of their deportation amounts to arbitrary detention and is thereby a violation of the personal liberty of the detained persons guaranteed as a fundamental right to all persons in the territory of India by Article 21 of the Constitution of India.