CIC to hear the appeal of the convict on death row through video conferencing
16 Apr, 2013An application was filed by one of the three convicts on death row for the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, AG Perarivalan, under the Right to Information (RTI) Act seeking to know the reasons behind the rejection of his mercy plea in August 2011 by the then President Pratibha Patil and how the home ministry had arrived at the decision.
Despite the fact that the RTI Act mandates that information officers must reply to a petition within 30 days, the officials didn’t provide a single reply to the repeated queries sent by the applicant since August 2011. Aggrieved by this the applicant then sent a direct appeal to the CIC by telegram complaining against Rashtrapati Bhavan and the ministry of home affairs for deliberately blocking his RTI petitions.
The CIC has set a date for the hearing of the case through video conferencing, a facility that is now available in all the central jails. The appellant, AG Perarivalan, is one of the three convicts who were awarded death sentence by a trial court in 1999 for the assassination of the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi.