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Govt urges SC to review decision restricting army's Afspa power

The government wants the Supreme Court to reconsider a landmark decision that dramatically slashed the army’s immunity in India’s conflict regions and ordered probes into hundreds of alleged extra-judicial killings.

The Centre filed on Wednesday a petition that said the SC’s 2016 verdict – which restrained the army from using “excessive or retaliatory force” under a controversial law – was affecting daily operations in areas such as Jammu and Kashmir and the Northeast, both regions torn by militancy.

“It’s an issue of national security,” attorney general Mukul Rohatgi told the top court, arguing for an open-court hearing into the Centre’s curative petition.

A curative petition is the last legal recourse available after a litigant exhausts all remedies such as appeals and review petition. Chances of success are rare but in recent years, the court has admitted some such pleas that raised important constitutional matters.

The 2016 verdict was cheered by activists, who have long pointed to a lack of oversight of military personnel. The decision had come on petitions demanding an investigation into 1,528 alleged cases of “extra-judicial killings” by the army in Manipur in a dozen years through to 2012.

At the centre of the petition is the controversial Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (Afspa), which shields troops from prosecution and is in force in parts of the northeast and Kashmir.

The decision was seen as the strongest judicial rebuke yet of the army’s special shoot-to-kill powers, which trace their origins to a British-era ordinance used to suppress the Quit India Movement of 1942. The army denies misusing the law.

Source: HindustanTimes