Raipur:
The Chhattisgarh High Court will continue hearing of the petition for the suspension of sentence and grant of bail of human rights activist Dr. Binayak Sen tomorrow. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment on sedition charges by the Additional District and Sessions Court at Raipur last month.
One of India's most eminent criminal lawyers and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Member of Parliament Ram Jethmalani represented Sen in court today.
61-year-old Sen, a paediatrician by profession, was arrested in May 2007 in Bilaspur on suspicions of acting as a courier between Kolkata businessman Pijush Guha and alleged Maoist ideologue Narayan Sanyal. He was jailed for two years before the Supreme Court granted him bail in 2009.
Binayak Sen's trial has been closely followed in India and abroad and was marked by allegations that the police had planted crucial evidence and coached key witnesses.
An eight-member team of European Union (EU) arrived in Raipur on Sunday to witness Sen's bail hearing. They faced protests from lawyers and Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) workers who showed EU representatives black flags and shouted slogans against them.
They alleged the the 27-member body, that arrived at the airport with Ram Jethmalani, of influencing judicial process in India.
"EU representatives come as observers but try to influence judicial process in India. We will not tolerate this," a protester said.
Jethmalani refused to comment on the protests.
The European Union delegation include representatives of Delhi based diplomatic missions from Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Sweden and the UK.
Earlier, United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur Margaret Sekaggya had said the "due process" should take place while dealing with the case and the world body was waiting to see the outcome of the appeal filed in a higher court against his sentence.
"We are waiting for the outcome of the case. We want to see how the case is going to be handled by the courts," Sekaggya, who was on a 10-day fact-finding mission in India to
look into the human rights situation in the country, had said in the Capital. (With PTI Inputs)