Shillong, Mar 19: The Supreme Court has asked the Centre to file response to the petitions seeking a stay on the implementation of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA).
The court has fixed the next hearing to be held on April 9.
The court granted three weeks to the Centre to respond to 237 petitions.
On Monday, the North East Students’ Organization (NESO) had filed a petition before the Supreme Court of India for staying the Rules for the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019.
In a statement, NESO chairman Samuel B Jyrwa said, “The supreme court today fixed the hearing on April 9. The Supreme Court has reiterated its earlier decision to segregate the hearing seperately for Assam, Tripura and North East from the rest of the other petitions from other parts of India. The Supreme Court today has also appointed Mr Ankit Yadav, the advocate of AASU and NESO as the nodal officer for the petitioners. It has also directed the GOI to file their response to the petitions before April 9.”
The NESO had filed a petition in the Supreme Court on December 19, 2019 against the CAA, 2019.
“Even though, CAA 2019 has exempted the ILP covered states which includes Mizoram, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur and also the Sixth Scheduled covered areas which include 98% of Meghalaya, 70% of Tripura and 8 districts of Assam but the 27 districts of Assam are not exempted, which poses a serious threat to the entire North Eastern states, which will be adversely affected in the near future,” Jyrwa had said.
“So to protect the microscopic indigenous communities of NE which are already affected by unabated influx of illegal migrants from Bangladesh,” Jyrwa had said.
