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India’s Supreme Court protected two Christian men from harassment in late May, ruling that the two criminal cases brought against them were an “abuse of the process of law.”
UCA News reported that the court ordered lower courts, which had previously ruled against Vinod Bihari Lal and David Dutta, to use their powers to examine whether “the criminal proceedings are being misused as instruments of oppression or harassment.”
The outlet reported that similar lawsuits are frequently used to target Christians in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, where Lal and Dutta are from. Police frequently register complaints accusing Christians of violating a law that criminalizes coercing religious conversion. The law provides an easy way for police to take Christians through a long, arduous, and expensive legal process, according to the outlet.
Police registered complaints against Lal and his friend Dutta in 2018, accusing them of being members of a gang that commits economic crimes “through fraud and deceit,” as well as other crimes, UCA News reported.
Lal is the director of Sam Higginbottom University of Agriculture, Technology and Science in the city of Prayagraj, where Dutta also lives. The state’s highest court heard their case in 2023, rejecting their plea for relief and allowing the district court to move forward with a criminal trial, UCA News reported. Lal appealed to the Supreme Court.
According to the outlet, the Supreme Court ruled May 24 that the police complaints were “in complete violation of the procedural safeguards” and added that there is no evidence for the complaints, only “conjectures and surmises.”
The court also said that further criminal proceedings would result in “undue harassment” and “the abuse of process of the law.”
According to UCA News, Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state, and Christians make up 0.18% of its population. From January to April this year, 50 incidents of persecution have been recorded against Christians in the state.
