Terming the Uttarakhand police’s decision to scan passport applicants’ social media accounts for “anti-national” posts as “arbitrary and illegal”, the Human Rights Defenders (HRD) Alert urged the State Chief Secretary on February 18, 2021 to withdraw “the unconstitutional executive orders.”

On February 2,  Director General of Police Ashok Kumar had  announced, at the State Police Officers’ Conference, that police will verify passport and arms license after checking for “anti-national” posts on people’s social media accounts. Kumar said police will keep an eye on applicants who post such content.

However, according to the HRD Alert, the move gagged democratic dissent against the government by dangling fear of non-issuance of passports.

“This will lead to arbitrary and high-handed decisions by the police about who is an anti-national and who is not. This is a clear attack on freedom of expression on the pretext of social media posts,” it said.

National Working Secretary of HRD Alert, Henri Tiphagne, said that the order was taken under political pressure to suppress voices critical of state actions and policies. Further, Tipahagne mentioned that the term “anti-national” is not defined by law and as such, it is the job of courts and not local police to decide what is anti-national.

In an open letter, the forum also stated that such a move will make it nearly impossible for people posting the aforementioned content to obtain an arms license or passport. Lawyers and activists have panned this move severely. High Court senior lawyer Kartikeya Gupta said, “It is a complete violation of an individual’s freedom expression and freedom of speech. Police has no right to decide whether any post on social media is anti-national or not; it is the job of the courts.”

Department officials said the decision was taken after an alleged ‘surge’ in such posts and social media accounts. Nonetheless, the HRD Alert pointed out that the order breaches Article 19 (1) (a) of the Indian Constitution, right to freedom of speech and expression. During the Shreya Singhal v. State (2015) the Supreme Court observed that three concepts are fundamental in understanding the reach of this most basic human rights: discussion, advocacy and incitement.

“Mere discussion or even advocacy of a particular cause howsoever unpopular is at the heart of Article 19(1)(a.) It is only when such discussion or advocacy reaches the level of incitement that Article 19(2) kicks in,” it said.

The human rights group also cited other rights such as Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR,) Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and Article 21 of the Constitution as explained in Maneka Gandhi’s case wherein it encompasses the right to travel abroad. Every Indian citizen has a fundamental right to travel outside India and it cannot be taken away on the basis of social media posts.

Related:

Hamid Ansari’s woes: Plight of Pluralism in India

Right to dissent is a hallmark of democracy: Justice Deepak Gupta

Why free speech supporters should consider Disha Ravi’s arrest a cause for concern

Erratic arrests by police and the Arnesh Kumar Judgement

Uttarakhand lost over 50,000 hectares of forest land since 1991: MoEF data

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Passports were never supposed to be forever. www.shutterstock.com

The first passport conference was held in Paris in 1920, under the auspices of the League of Nations (the predecessor of the United Nations). Part of the Committee on Communication and Transit’s aim was to restore the pre-war regime of freedom of movement.

Indeed, for much of the 19th century, as an International Labour Organisation report stated in 1922:

Migration was generally speaking, unhindered and each emigrant could decide on the time of his departure, his arrival or his return, to suit his own convenience.

But the World War I brought harsh restrictions on freedom of movement.

In 1914, warring states France, Germany, and Italy were the first to make passports mandatory, a measure rapidly followed by others, including the neutral states of Spain, Denmark and Switzerland.

At the end of the war, the regime of obligatory passports was widespread. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which established the League of Nations, stipulated that member states commit to “secure and maintain freedom of communications and of transit”.

Freedom of movement was on the agenda at the Treaty of Versailles. Imperial War Museum London

Fences are easier to build than to dismantle. The 1920 Paris conference recognised that restrictions on freedom of movement affect “personal relations between the peoples of various countries” and “constitute a serious obstacle to the resumption of normal intercourse and to the economic recovery of the world”.

But its delegates also assumed that security concerns prevented:

for the time being, the total abolition of restrictions and the complete return to pre-war conditions which the Conference hopes, nevertheless, to see gradually re-established in the near future.

To facilitate freedom of movement, participants agreed instead to establish a uniform, international passport, issued for a single journey or for a period two years. This is how we ended up with the format of the passports we use today.
Participants also decided to abolish exit visas and decrease the cost of entry visas.
 

Close but no cigar

During the conferences that followed, several resolutions again highlighted the goal of abolishing passports, but concluded that the time was not yet right. In 1924, the International Conference of Emigration and Immigration in Rome maintained that “the necessity of obtaining passports should be abolished as soon as possible” but in the meantime advocated other measures to facilitate travel. These measures included an increase in the number of offices delivering passports, allowing emigrants to save time and money.

In Geneva in 1926, Polish delegate, Franciszek Sokal, opened proceedings by bluntly asking the parties to adopt “as a general rule that all States Members of the League of Nations should abolish passports”.
At that time, passports and visas were still regarded as a serious obstacle to freedom of movement, as a Mr Junod from the International Chamber of Commerce said:

Could not the Conference adopt a resolution contemplating the abolition of passports at the earliest possible date? Public opinion would regard this as a step in the right direction.

But by then, most governments had already adopted the uniform passport and some of them saw it as an important document that was meant to protect emigrants. As the Italian delegate reminded the conference that conditions had changed after the war and the passport was “particularly necessary as an identification document for workers and their families; it provided them with the protection they needed, enabled them to obtain permits of sojourn.”
Another delegate alluded to the Soviet Union when he refused to restore the pre-war regime. He said:

conditions had changed so much since the war that everyone had to take into consideration a good many things they could formerly ignore.

Discussions about passport abolition resumed after World War II.

In 1947, the first problem considered at an expert meeting preparing for the UN World Conference on Passports and Frontier Formalities, was “the possibility of a return to the regime which existed before 1914 involving as a general rule the abolition of any requirement that travelers should carry passports”.

But delegates ultimately decided that a return to a passport-free world could only happen alongside a return to the global conditions that prevailed before the start of the first world war. By 1947, that was a distant dream. The experts advised instead a series of bilateral and multilateral agreements to attain this goal.

World leaders were still talking about banning passports as late as 1963, when the UN Conference on International Travel and Tourism recognised “the desirability, from both an economic and social point, of progressively freer international travel”. Once again, it was estimated that “it is not feasible to recommend the abolition of passports on a world-wide basis.”

Now, neither the public nor governments consider passports as a serious obstacle to freedom of movement, though any would-be traveller from Yemen, Afghanistan or Somalia would no doubt argue differently.
It takes less than a century, it seems, to see the absence of freedom as a natural condition.

Author is Associate Professor of Political Sciences, Université Paris Descartes – USPC

This article was first published on The Conversation

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