By IANS,
New Delhi : The Supreme Court Monday voiced unhappiness over the reluctance of the police in the country to register criminal cases on complaints from the poor and other victims of crime.
Upset over police hesitation to file First Information Reports (FIR), a bench of judges B.N. Agrawal and G.S. Singhvi sought to know from governments in the country what remedial steps they have taken to address the problem.
The judges got upset while hearing a lawsuit by a poor women from Ghaziabad in Uttar Pradesh who was turned away from the Loni police station without registering an FIR about the kidnapping of her 16-year-old daughter.
“It is a disturbing state of affair in the country,” the bench observed, while issuing notices to the central and state governments.
The bench felt aghast that the police refuse to register FIRs even though it is mandatory.
The judges ordered that the apex court’s judgement for mandatory registration of FIRs by the police be put up on its website so that it could be easily accessed by people needing to know their right to have an FIR registered in case they fall victim to a crime.
Registration of an FIR is the first legal acknowledgement of occurrence of a crime that needs a probe by the police.