SC Appoints Sr Adv Anand Grover As Amicus Curiae To Assist The Court [Read Order]

The SC on Friday appointed Senior Advocate Anand Grover as amicus curiae to assist the Court in a matter regarding the suo moto powers of National Green Tribunal.

The bench of Justices S A Bobde and B R Gavai made the appointment based on the consent of the parties who were represented by ASG ANS Nadkarni, Senior Advocate Dhruv Mehta, Advocates Prashant Kumar, Amir Singh etc.

Significantly, this comes a day after Grover's offices and residences in Delhi and Mumbai were subjected to raids by the Central Bureau of Investigation in relation to the FIR registered against Lawyers Collective in June on allegations of Foreign Contributions Regulations Act.

Grover is one of the founders of Lawyers Collective, apart from Senior Advocate Indira Jaising, whose offices were also raided yesterday.

 Anand Grover is known for activism for the protection of rights of LGBT community, HIV/AIDs patients etc. He was the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to health from August 2008 to July 2014. He is currently and acting member of the Global Commission on Drug Policy. He had led the Naz Foundation's case in Delhi High Court which had decriminalized homosexuality in 2009.

Terming the CBI raids as 'vicious means to humiliate, silence and intimidate', the Lawyers Collective said in a statement that "The Lawyers Collective has been targeted because of the nature of cases that Ms. Jaising and Mr. Grover have taken up in their professional capacity, including those against the leading figures of the ruling dispensation in various sensitive cases."

It said that the officials from Ministry of Home Affairs had inspected the offices in 2016 itself in relation to FCRA issues, and several documents running into thousands of pages were handed over to the MHA by the organization. That being so, the sudden raid after three years is "malicious in nature", said the Collective.

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