NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court said that the chargesheet submitted by investigating agencies in a criminal case in court is not a public document which could be directed to be put in public domain by publishing it on a site and also it can not be exposed under Right to Information Act.A bench of Justices M R Shah and C T Ravikumar declined a plea seeking that on the line of FIR being submitted on site, chargesheet be likewise published by the firms so that the general public might access them.
The petitioner looked for that the peak courts 2016 decision on uploading FIR should be reached chargesheet.Referring to 2016 verdict, the bench stated the judgement directed copies of the FIRs to be released within 24 hours on the cops sites was passed to safeguard the interest of the accused and to guarantee that the innocent implicated are not bothered and they are not taken by surprise.
Therefore, the directions provided by this Court remain in favour of the implicated, which can not be stretched to the public at large up until now as the chargesheets are concerned, the bench said.
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the examining agency is required to furnish the copies of the report in addition to the relevant documents to be trusted by the prosecution to the implicated and to none others.
For that reason, if the relief as prayed in the present petition is allowed and all the chargesheets and relevant files produced in addition to the chargesheets are put on the general public domain or on the websites of the state federal governments it will contrast the Scheme of the Criminal Procedure Code and it might as such breach the rights of the accused along with the victim and/or even the examining firm.
Putting the FIR on the site can not be equated with putting the chargesheets in addition to the relevant files on the general public domain and on the sites of the State Governments, the bench said.It said copy of the chargesheet together with the required files can not be stated to be public files within the definition of Public Documents as per Section 74 of the Evidence Act.The court also held that copies of the chargesheet and the appropriate files do not fall within Section 4( 1 )(b) of the RTI Act.