Security State, Exceptional Laws & Scope Of Preventive Detention Laws In India: A Critical Examination From Perspective Of Substantive Freedom
Amit Kumar Singh, Ph.D. Scholar, Centre for the Study of Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi
ABSTRACT
In recent decades, especially after terrorism became one of potent security threat to the established world order, the security of the state and protection of sovereignty of the state have become dominant themes of foreign policy and international relations and law as well as crucial concerns of domestic laws and the national governments. The democratic rights of citizens are sought to be protected under broader framework of security and protection of state from terrorism. Threats to the security may come from a foreign territory or from domestic one. The external as well as internal threats need to be handled in order to protects the rights of citizens as well as ensuring the peace, stability on the one hand, and law and order on the other.
The protection of state security and sovereignty depends on several variables. One of these variables is law and legal machinery which empowers states authorities to take preventive steps to prevent the activities antithetical to the security and sovereignty of the state and protection of the rights of citizens. The preventive law is being justified as an exceptional law which are invoked during exceptional circumstances and where the general substantive and procedural laws cannot ensure effective prevention of such crimes against state and protection of the rights of the citizens.
Thus, this paper aims to examine provisions of the preventive detention laws with respect to the Union and states as well as how the security paradigm is changing the pattern of use of preventive detention laws frequently somehow undermining the substantive and procedural aspects of law in India.
Keywords: preventive detention laws, exception laws, security state, general laws.
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