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High Court quashes PSA detention of Shopian man held on vague and unverifiable allegations
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The High Court of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh has quashed the PSA detention of Ubaid Yousuf Kuttai of Chotipora, Shopian, ordering his release from preventive detention. A division bench comprising Acting Chief Justice Sanjeev Kumar and Justice Muhammad Yousuf Wani found that the detention order, issued by the District Magistrate of Shopian on 12 September 2024, was based on vague, unverifiable, and bald allegations unsupported by any evidence or material. The court stated it was unsafe to consider such vague allegations as constituting a past act from which any inference about the detainee's future conduct could be drawn.
The court's language is worth holding: vague, unverifiable, bald allegations unsupported by any evidence or material. That is the High Court's characterisation of what a District Magistrate in Shopian used to imprison a Kashmiri man for nearly two years.
Ubaid Yousuf Kuttai is free today because the court found the allegations against him could not withstand examination. His case joins a growing list of PSA detentions quashed by the High Court in 2026 alone on identical grounds: vague, evidenceless, and constitutionally indefensible. Each ruling frees one person. The law that imprisoned them, and the system of District Magistrate orders that activates it without judicial oversight, remains entirely intact. Thousands of Kashmiris remain detained under PSA orders that no court has yet examined. The question the High Court's repeated interventions produce is unanswered and urgent: how many of those thousands are being held on allegations equally vague, equally unverifiable, and equally unsupported by material evidence?
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