The High Court Tuesday asked the authorities concerned to explain why the provisions relating to ill-gotten property in the Anti-Corruption Commission Act 2004 should not be declared unconstitutional.
The bench of Justice AHM Shamsuddin Chowdhury and Justice Gobinda Chandra Tagore asked the government and the Anti-Corruption Commission to explain the
legality of the Sections 26(2) and 27(1) of the act.
According to Section 26(2), a person can be jailed for three years for failure to submit wealth statement in defiance of the commission's notice asking the person to do so or for giving false information in wealth statement.
Section 27(1) has provisions for sentencing a person to imprisonment ranging from three years to 10 years for amassing wealth, disproportionate to his legal sources of income.
After hearing separate writ petitions filed by Dhaka City Corporation's assistant engineer Rafiqul Islam and his wife, the court also asked the government and the commission to explain why the graft cases filed against them by the commission under the sections should not be declared illegal.
Secretaries to the law and home ministries, and the cabinet division, ACC chairman, Dhaka deputy commissioner and the Dhaka chief metropolitan magistrate were asked to answer in three weeks.
The petitioners' counsel, Kazi Aktar Hamid argued that if the petitioners' property were not properly reflected in their income tax return, they might be prosecuted under section 128 of Income Tax Manual, Part-1, which deals with penalties for concealment of income, but they could not be prosecuted or punished under the ACC provisions.
'The ACC provisions are 'absolutely arbitrary' as they encouraged ACC investigation officers to pick and choose policy which is violation of the fundamental rights of the citizens enshrined in the articles 27 and 31 of the constitution.'
Source: New Age
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