Supreme Court Stays Telangana HC order to Conduct mandatory COVID-19 tests on dead bodies
(Judicial Quest News Network)
The Supreme Court stayed a Telangana High Court order directing the state to conduct tests COVID-19 on dead bodies before they are released from the hospital.
A three-judge bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan, SK Kaul & MR Shah observed that the Telangana High Court passed a “Premature” Order.
The Telangana Government had challenged the High Court’s May 26 directive before the Supreme Court, which observed today that High Court order to be “premature”
Telangana High Court on June, 8 while considering the compliance report filed by the State Government with regard to state of affairs of testing being conducted in the state, the HC had admonished the Government and had noted,
“It is, indeed. Trite to state that if the directions issued by this Court are not implemented by the respondents, this Court eventually would have no other option, but to Issue contempt notice to the respondents for their intentional, and wilful disobedience of the orders passed by this Court. This statement is being made as a warning to the respondents, not to ignore the directions of this Court. For, neither the majesty of the law.
nor the majesty of the High Court, can be ignored by the respondents.”
The state government plea challenging this order states that the order was primarily based on hearsay evidence and newspaper reports.
“High Court is not justified in not relying upon the data as produced by the State and in stating that the State has taken a lackadaisical attitude or is not representing correct data and in giving leverage to the data as was reported by the various news articles without any authentication etc., especially in light of the settled principle of law that news-items published in the newspapers are only hear-say evidence and no judicial notice can be taken of the news-items which are in the nature of hear-say secondary evidence, unless proved by evidence. It is most humbly submitted that the Petitioner State and its functionaries 28 have ever since the outbreak of the COVID-19, trying to combat with the situation with all the medical and other facilities and has made and promoted all the endeavours’ to curb and end the whole situation and it is because such huge pressure and drain of energy that sometimes some discrepancies are bound to arise in the data being managed by the Officials who are working on the same day in and day out, which is just human.
The petition Drawn and filed by Advocate S. Uday Kumar Sagar also responded to the high court’s observations regarding low testing rates, pointing out that ICMR is itself does not have enough testing kits. Thus, there was a dip in the tests conducted, it is submitted.
“it is matter of public record that the ICMR is entrusted with and put in charge of the COVID 19 testing kits, however, it is matter of public knowledge that ICMR itself is struggling to procure sufficient number of testing kits and as such any decision taken by the State and modification/ alteration therein is nothing but the reflection of prevailing hard realities.
Telangana High Court had directed the Collectors of Nirmal and Suryapet to furnish detailed reports on the number of guest workers who had returned and the tests performed on them.
Telangana HC had issued the order on the basis of five PILs filed by PL Vishvehwar Rao, Dr Cheruku Sudhakar, Varun Sankineni, Dr KP Rajender, Gadwal and Advocate Naresh Reddy Chinnola from Nirmal.
