Supreme Court halts deportation of woman declared foreigner in Assam

The Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily stayed the deportation of a woman who was declared a foreigner by Assam’s Foreigners Tribunal in 2017.

The Guahati High Court had on February 17 dismissed a petition by the woman, Jaynab Bibi, challenging the tribunal’s order.

On Tuesday, a bench of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice Vinod Chandran issued a notice on Bibi’s plea against the High Court order. The matter will be heard next on August 25.

Bibi has told the court that she is an Indian citizen who was born and raised in Assam’s Nagaon district, The Hindu reported.

She presented before the court the 1951 National Register of Citizens list, and the voter lists from 1965 and 1970, all of which included her grandfather’s name. She also pointed out that subsequent voters’ lists in 1989 and 1997 had her parents’ names while those from 2016 and 2018 had her husband’s name, the newspaper reported.

Her petition before the Supreme Court claimed that the tribunal ignored these key pieces of evidence and declared Bibi a foreigner in an “arbitrary and mechanical manner”.

The Foreigners Tribunals in Assam are quasi-judicial bodies that adjudicate on matters of citizenship. They have been accused of arbitrariness and bias, and declaring people foreigners on the basis of minor spelling mistakes, a lack of documents or lapses in memory.

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