Case: Pabitra N. Rana Vs. Union of India and Others

This Writ Petition has been filed with a prayer that an order of detention passed against the petitioner on the 7th September, 1979, under s. 3(1) of the Conservation of Foreign Exchange and Prevention of Smuggling Activities Act, 1974 be quashed. After the order was served on the detenu he made a representation on the 27th September, 1979 to the Govt. who received it on the 28th September, 1979.

Court's reasoning:
The observations extracted above clearly show that the representation must be considered by the Government as expeditiously as possible.In the first place no such facts have been pleaded in the reply filed by the respondents and, therefore, we cannot entertain the grounds now urged by the counsel for the Union for the first time in the arguments before us. Even so it appears that at the most the detaining authority had forwarded the representation to the Revenue Intelligence whose comments were received on 16-10-79. Thereafter there was absolutely no justification for any delay in taking a decision on the merit of the representation. Even if we assume that there was some reasonable explanation for the delay from 28th September, 1979 to 16th October, 1979, there appears to be no good explanation whatsoever for the delay from 16th October, 1979 to 2nd November, 1979 when the representation was rejected by the Government. It is manifest that the Government was not obliged to wait for the decision of the Board because it had to consider the representation independently of what the Board might say. In this view of the matter, we are satisfied that there has been unreasonable delay in deciding the representation filed by the detenu and that by itself is sufficient to render the detention void.