Supreme Court today made petitioners on Pegasus case—Editors’ Guild and journalist N Ram and Shashi Kumar—red in face, asking them what’s new in this time’s Pegasus to one of two years ago and what prevented them from filling in a FIR all this while.
The Supreme Court bench of Chief Justice NV Ramana and Justice Surya Kant today heard as many as nine petitions on the case.
The apex court observed that snooping allegations, if media reports are correct, are serious issues. However, it was displeased why there was a two-year delay in filing a plea. Further, what’s new in the allegations; not to say that none of the petitioners had filed an FIR before filing a case in the court.
Congress leader and senior counsel Kapil Sibal appeared for three of the petitioners—N. Ram, Shashi Kumar and Editors Guild of India.
CJI said, “You all know that there is a prima facie material as well as the credibility of reports where we can order an enquiry etc. unfortunately what I read from writs, in may 2019 this came to light I don’t know there was no serious concern about this issue.” The court further noted that there should have been more hard words to put more material in the petitions.
In defence, advocate CU Singh said though the allegations of snooping using Pegasus had emerged in 2019, the names of the persons targeted were not known. He claimed the names were now known after the list was published by the media houses.
CJI Ramanna said, “They have not made efforts to file a criminal complaint. My question is if you know the phone is hacked then why wasn’t an FIR lodged. That is the only question.”
The CJI said the petitioners are knowledgeable and resourceful journalists and activists and they should have put in more effort to collect verifiable materials.
The court said there were far too many petitions and therefore it can’t proceed further without hearing the central government. It asked the petitioners to serve the copy of their petitions to the central government. Some of the petitioners did say they had served the copy to Centre while others said they didn’t.
Journalist N Ram, one of the petitioners, had mentioned in his plea that a California Court had said that some Indian journalists were targeted using the spyware. But when CJI asked advocate Kapil Sibal where the names were mentioned as the court could not find any such thing in the said judgement, Sibal agreed that the statement made in the affidavit in N Ram was incorrect, and no Indian journalist was named by California Court.
The court has posted the matter for further hearing on August 10.
