NEW DELHI: The supreme court on Friday ruled that “stricter sentence” must be imposed on foreigners who overstay in the country in order to check growing infiltration across the border.
Upholding the five-year imprisonment awarded to a Pakistani national Habib Ibrahim, whose family is settled in Rajasthan, for overstaying in the country, a bench of Justices Arijit Pasayat and PP Naolekar said the only plea to justify Ibrahim’s presence at Vidhyadhar Nagar in Jaipur on January 13, 2004, was that he had come to visit his wife and children.
He had been issued a transit visa for Nepal, for six months. He didn’t have valid documents for India. “That does not give him any right to stay illegally in India…The conviction, therefore, cannot be faulted. So far as the sentence is concerned, considering the large number of infiltrators coming to India without valid documents, there is need for imposing stricter sentence,” the apex court said.
Ibrahim has already undergone a three-year jail term. The SC rejected Ibrahim’s “feeble plea” that he did not know he was required to have valid document. He wouldn’t have obtained a transit visa for Nepal, it noted.
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