The Supreme court has sought the Centre’s view on the plea by an Indian national, locked in a foreign jail, to be allowed to spend his remaining term in India. The court on Friday asked the Attorney General whether such an arrangement is possible under the existing International Conventions, and whether conceding the plea could open floodgate of requests from similar convicts.
This is the first time that Inter-American Convention on Serving Criminal Sentences Abroad, 1993 will be discussed. This Convention was ratified by the United States in 2001, where petitioner Venkataram Natarajan Raju is currently lodged. India acceded to this Convention in May 2014 but is yet to ratify it.
The Bench, headed by Justice Dipak Misra, though found the petition to be asking for too many reliefs decided to forward a copy of the petition to the office of Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi. Senior advocate Raju Ramachandran, who represented the petitioner, also had this suggestion to offer as the best possible legal remedy in the given circumstances.
The petitioner, an electronic engineer by profession, had left his Bangalore home in 1988 to US to pursue his higher studies. He was arrested in December 2005 for financial impropriety and alleged money laundering and sentenced to 15 years imprisonment at a minimum security prison by the Manhattan District Court on July 11, 2008. Currently lodged at the Federal Correctional Institution in New Jersey, he has completed nine years of his prison term and wants to avail the benefit of the Convention.
The US Federal Bureau of Prisons has already approved the petitioner but it is the Indian authorities who are dragging their feet. The petition filed by advocate Purushottam Sharma Tripathi has made both the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of External Affairs as party. Since July 25, 2014, when the US authorities granted approval, the petitioner has addressed five letters to the two Ministries.
The petitioner had made no mean achievement in his field for which he received a rare honour in 2004 by winning the Ronald Reagan Award from the World Business Forum for his pioneering work on “Unified Victim Identification System”. This is his patented invention that can identify persons in a mass fatality incident using their DNA. This worked wonders during the September 2001 twin tower attacks enabling identification of victims.
From the correctional home, he daily attends work at Management Information Systems, based at New York where he is the Director. The allegation against him is that he siphoned off money earmarked for a project and allegedly laundered the money to India.