LONDON (PTI): The high court of England has upheld the British Government’s deportation order against a Sikh, Karamjit Singh Chahal, “for reasons of national security.”

The court dismissed Chahal’s application for judicial review on the grounds that home secretary Kenneth Clarke had acted unreasonable by refusing him Asylum and seeking to exclude him from Britain.

Chahal, 44, father of two children, has lived in Britain for two years and the decision to deport him to India was taken in 1990.

He has since been in prison. It was the second time Chahal had asked the High Court to review the British government’s order.

 

Chahal had sought Asylum in Britain arguing that he had been tortured by the Indian police in 1984 while on a visit to Punjab and was likely to be tortured again because of his role in the “Khalistan movement” (a movement for the separation and renaming of the Indian state of Punjab as Khalistan).

The High Court Judge said he was satisfied that the home secretary “implicitly and clearly evaluated the risk of torture against the risk of national security and decided that the latter outweighed the former.”

 

Article extracted from this publication >>  February 19, 1993