New Delhi: Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) has filed a plea before the Supreme Court seeking a direction to stay the implementation of Citizen Amendment Rules, 2024.
The plea requested the apex court to pass an order staying the continued operation of the impugned provisions of Citizen Amendment Act, 2019; and Citizen Amendment Rules, 2024, which would result in valuable rights being created and citizenship being granted to persons belonging to only certain religions.
As the Centre on Monday notified the Citizenship (Amendment) Rules, 2024, to enable the persons eligible under the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019, to apply for the grant of Indian citizenship, more than 230 petitions challenging the amendment remain pending before the Supreme Court since December 2019.
“It is submitted there are about 250 petitions which were filed and pending before this court challenging various provisions of the CAA. If in case this court finally decided the CAA as unconstitutional, then these people who would have got citizenship under the Act and Rules would have to be deprived of their citizenship or stripped of their citizenship, which would create an anomalous situation”, said the plea.
IUML stressed that it is in the best interest of every person to defer the implementation of CAA and rules till this court finally decides the matter.
IUML said its position is that this is a legislation which is based on exclusion of a religion. “Since the CAA discriminates on the basis of religion, it strikes at the root of the concept of secularism, which is the basic structure of the Constitution. Therefore, one way of looking at implementation of the Act would be to make it religion neutral and give citizenship to all migrants irrespective of their religious status”, said the plea.
Passed by Parliament on December 11, 2019, the CAA was notified on January 10. It relaxes norms for grant of Indian citizenship by naturalization to Hindu, Sikh, Christian, Buddhist and Jain and Parsi victims of religious persecution from Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh who came to India before December 31, 2014. In violent protests against the CAA several persons were killed in Uttar Pradesh and dozens of others injured in the state and elsewhere, including Delhi.
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