INDIA: SC refuses to re-open Bhopal gas tragedy case

(May 11, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) The Supreme Court turned down on Wednesday CBI's demand to re-open the case into the Bhopal gas tragedy and hand harsher sentences to seven men convicted of negligence. The 1984 Bhopal accident, blamed on Union Carbide, a US chemical group that ran the plant, killed thousands instantly and tens of thousands more from its lingering effects in the following years.

A government lawsuit had called for the seven company executives convicted last year of negligence to be tried on a more serious charge of "culpable homicide not amounting to murder," which carries a jail term of 10 years.

But the bid was rejected.

"The curative petition is based on a plea that is wrong and fallacious," a five-judge bench in the top court said, adding that "no satisfactory explanation" had been given for filing the petition after so long.

In this matter, Madhya Pradesh government has also moved the apex court seeking its permission to intervene in the petition filed by CBI to re-examine September 1996 judgement by which the accused persons were tried for the offence of criminal negligence which resulted in a lighter punishment of two years' jail term of several accused, including former Union Carbide India chairman Keshub Mahindra, on June 7, 2010.

Keshub Mahindra opposed CBI's plea arguing that the case should be decided on the basis of law and not on the basis of facts.

The apex court had on August 31, 2010, decided to re-examine its own judgement that led to lighter punishment of two years imprisonment for all the seven convicts.

Besides Mahindra, Vijay Gokhale, the then managing director of UCIL, Kishore Kamdar, then vice president, JN Mukund, then works manager, SP Choudhary, then production manager, KV Shetty, then plant superintendent and SI Quereshi, then production assistant were convicted and sentenced to two years' jail term by a trial court in Bhopal on June 7, 2010.