The Delhi high court on Monday refused to hear a plea by Christian James Michel, the so-called middleman in the Agustawestland VVIP chopper scandal that he was petitioning to invalidate the India-UAE extradition treaty. Michel had raised a major stipulation in the 1999 treaty, under which Section 17, allows India to prosecute a person extradited to it not only on the indictments made on the basis of the grant of extradition but also on any related offences.
The extradition treaty was not a Parliament law and could not be reviewed and held unconstitutional by the Court by a bench of Justices Vivek Chaudhary and Manoj Jain who noted that the extradition treaty was not a law enacted by Parliament. The judges made it clear that a treaty, unless it is incorporated into the domestic law by the parliamentary bills, is not subject to judicial review by the court in terms of constitutionality. The bench pointed out that it is not enacted by the Parliament, it is not even a law and therefore unless it is a law, it will not be declared ultra vires.
The legal counsel of Michel, Aljo K Joseph, contended that Michel was chargedheathed in 2017 against Sections 8, 9, and 12 of the Prevention of Corruption Act, which amid the 2018 amendment carried a five-year maximum sentence. Nevertheless, by means of additional chargesheets, the agency subsequently incorporated Section 467 of Indian Penal Code, which is an offence connected to forgery and punishable by life imprisonment.
The counsel also argued that Michel has already been imprisoned in India, five years, on top of five years he spent in detention in the UAE prior to extradition, and therefore his further imprisonment was unwarranted. He contended that the application of the more serious offence of IPC after extradition was a breach of the principle of specialty which traditionally prohibits the prosecution of the offences which were established at the time of extradition.
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