Bilkis Bano case: Justice Bela Trivedi recuses from hearing plea against pre-mature release of 11 convicts

Justice Bela M Trivedi, Supreme Court judge, on Tuesday recused herself from hearing the plea filed by Bilkis Bano, challenging the pre-mature release of 11 convicts, who had gang-raped her and murdered her family members during the 2002 Godhra riots.
A bench of Justices Ajay Rastogi and Bela M Trivedi said the matter be posted before another bench. Besides filing a petition against the per-mature release of convicts, Bano has also filed a review petition seeking its earlier order by which it had asked the Gujarat government to consider the plea for the remission of one of the convicts.
The review petition was also listed for hearing today before Justice Rastogi in his camber.

Bilkis said that even being the victim of the crime, she had no clue about any such process of remission or premature release initiated.
Gujarat’s remission order is a mechanical order of remission by completely ignoring the law requirement as consistently laid down, the plea said.
Earlier, some PILs were filed seeking directions to revoke the remission granted to 11 convicts.

The pleas were filed by the National Federation of Indian Women, whose General Secretary is Annie Raja, Member of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) Subhashini Ali, journalist Revati Laul, social activist and professor Roop Rekha Verma and TMC MP Mahua Moitra.

The Gujarat government had released the 11 convicts, who were sentenced to life imprisonment, on August 15. All the 11 life-term convicts in the case were released as per the remission policy prevalent in Gujarat at the time of their conviction in 2008.
In March 2002 during the post-Godhra riots, Bano was allegedly gang-raped and left to die with 14 members of her family, including her three-year-old daughter. She was five months pregnant when rioters attacked her family in Vadodara.