Curative petitions March 31, 2014
VOICES AGAINST 377 filing Curative Petition in Supreme Court tomorrow, March 31, 2014
As we know, the next step in the legal challenge on 377 is the filing of a Curative petition. The curative, unlike the review petitions that were filed in January, is not an immediate technical review (“errors on the face of the record”) like what we filed in January. It is instead based on the claim that there is a larger, gross miscarriage of justice that must be corrected. The curative, like the review, will be heard in chambers by a bench headed by the Chief Justice Sathasivam, and the most senior judges of the Court, Lodha and Dattu, along with Mukhopadhyay from our SC bench.
Voices will file on Monday. We believe several other petitioners are also ready to file on Monday. Two other intervenors should be ready to file by the end of this week. The petitions are likely to be heard together as a group. We don’t have a time line as to when it will come up before the Court. Basically, all the petitioners who were in the Supreme Court will have filed Curative petitions.
As soon as we file tomorrow, we’ll share the full text of the Voices petition. It’s going through last minute formatting now.
It’s important that these curative petitions be filed – it completes the process we started a long time ago, allows us to defend the 2009 decision with every possible legal means available to us, and exhausts all strategies and pathways open to us legally even as we think, as a community, what to do ahead.
The difficult truth is that curative petitions are statistically a very, very long shot. But we must try. We must also, however, remember that it’s just one thing the community is/has been doing and we should continue all the diverse efforts, campaigns, initiatives that have preceded this case, continued alongside it and all the new ones that have emerged since December, both inside and outside the court, both on 377 and beyond it. We move forward, inch by inch, for as long as it takes.
In every solidarity,
