Delhi High Court Special bench cites lack of time to hear all Delhi Riots bail petitions; says will take a call next week

A special bench of Justices Siddharth Mridul and Justice Rajnish Bhatnagar of the Delhi High Court on Friday expressed reservations about hearing bail appeals in the Delhi riots cases due to time constraints. .The bench said that since it sits in special composition, it will have to consider whether it can find time to hear all the eight appeals listed before it..Justice Mridul and Bhatnagar were sitting together and hearing criminal appeals when the Umar Khalid’s bail appeal came before them. Later, bail pleas of Sharjeel Imam, Khalid Saifi, Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Mohammad Saleem Khan and Shifa Ur Rehman also came to be listed before the bench. The bench is also seized of State’s appeal against bail granted to Ishrat Jahan..However, the two judges are not sitting on the bench together anymore after a change in roster. But they had assembled as a special bench to hear Umar Khalid’s appeal. Khalid’s bail appeal was rejected by the court last month..When Khalid’s Saifi’s appeal came up for hearing today and Senior Advocate Rebecca John started with her arguments, the judges wondered whether it would be possible for them to assemble frequently and hear all eight-appeals given the fact that it is a special composition.The Court said that these are the appeals that they have never heard and none of them are part-heard before them.“There is going to be a difficulty. The difficulty is that this is a a special bench. We can’t possibly be hearing bail appeals Friday to Friday. We heard Umar Khalid (case) because we had already begun to hear that. Because at that time it was the roster bench. So we have to consider whether it would be possible to assemble every alternate Friday,” Justice Mridul said..The bench said that it will post these batch of matters for Monday, November 21 when it will take a call whether these cases should be heard by them or transferred to the roster bench.If the matters are transferred, they will be heard by a bench of Justices Mukta Gupta and Anish Dayal.“Arguments are yet to begin. In that sense alone, none of these appeals are part-heard before us. We will have to take a call because this is likely to take a long time. We would not like to curtain any of the appellants in any manner and surely we can’t expect you.. we don’t know when we would be able to conclude all of this,” the bench remarked.