The Supreme Court has come down hard against the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), stating that the agency was issuing refugee cards to immigrants residing in the country as if it has opened a showroom here.
Hearing a petition filed by a Sudanese national seeking interim protection from deportation, the apex court said UNHCR-issued cards were not a legal protection for refugees in India to seek relief as these documents hold no statutory validity under Indian law.
The top court expressed concern over the UN agency’s practice of issuing such cards in the country, amid growing judicial concern over the operations of international bodies in India, news agency UNI reported.
Justice Surya Kant, heading a bench with Justice Joymalya Bagchi, said, “We have to be very, very careful… lakhs and lakhs are sitting here,” while declining to give interim relief to the petitioner who has been living in India since 2013 and had sought interim protection from deportation while awaiting a decision on his asylum application in Australia.
“They have opened a showroom here and are issuing certificates,” the bench said, in remarks highly critical of the UNHCR’s operations in India.
The petitioner’s lawyer, Senior Advocate S Muralidhar, informed the court that the Sudanese national’s wife and two children, including a 40-day-old infant, had already been issued refugee cards by the UNHCR. He said the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Foreigners’ Registration Office look at the cases of individuals, who have been issued refugee certificates by the UNHCR, differently, and added that such documents are issued by the UN agency only after a rigorous verification process that sometimes takes years.
Reacting to these arguments, Justice Kant said, “They (the UN agency) are issuing certificates to anyone… we don’t want to comment further.”
Meanwhile, when informed that the NHRC had already taken cognisance of the issue, the court disposed of the petition, granting the petitioner liberty to approach the rights body to finalise appropriate directions, including protection from coercive action.