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The Jammu and Kashmir High Court has quashed the preventive detention orders of two Kashmiri youth held under the Public Safety Act, ordering their immediate release and stating in its judgment that the detentions amounted to a sheer abuse of the process of law.

The High Court's characterisation is significant not for its rarity but for what it confirms about a law that produces such outcomes with documented consistency. The PSA allows detention for up to two years without charge or trial on the basis of a District Magistrate's order alone. Amnesty International has documented it as a lawless law. The High Court has now added its own institutional voice to that assessment in this case, finding that the process by which these two young men were detained was not law enforcement but its abuse.

That the court has ruled in this instance does not change the architecture that produced the detention. Thousands of Kashmiris remain held under the same legislation that the court has today called an abuse of process. The ruling frees two people. The law that imprisoned them remains entirely intact.

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