Nirbhaya Case: After SC Rejects Fresh Plea, 3 Convicts Move ICJ Seeking Stay on Execution

The three convicts who approached the ICJ include Akshay Singh, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma. They moved the ICJ as their scheduled date for execution has been fixed for March 20 at 5:30 AM.

New Delhi: Soon after the Supreme Court rejected the plea of Mukesh Singh in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case, the three of the four death row convicts in the case approached the International Court of Justice (ICJ), seeking a stay on the execution of their death sentence.

The three convicts who approached the ICJ include Akshay Singh, Pawan Gupta and Vinay Sharma. They moved the ICJ as their scheduled date for execution has been fixed for March 20 at 5:30 AM.

Also called as the World Court, the International Court of Justice is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.

The development comes after the top court rejected the plea of Mukesh Singh, one of the four death-row convicts in the 2012 Nirbhaya gang-rape and murder case, seeking restoration of all his legal remedies alleging that his earlier lawyers misled him.

So far, President Ram Nath Kovind has rejected the mercy petitions of all the convicts in the matter.

Observing that Mukesh Singh’s plea as ‘not maintainable’, the top court bench of Justices Arun Mishra and M R Shah said that the review petition and the curative petition have both been dismissed in the case.

In the plea, Mukesh Singh had sought quashing of all orders passed by courts and the rejection of his mercy petition by President Ram Nath Kovind since the day his curative petition was dismissed by the apex court on the ground that the earlier lawyer Vrinda Grover had misled him.

Prior to this, a trial court had on March 5 issued fresh warrants with March 20, 5.30 AM as the date for the execution of the convicts Mukesh Singh (32), Pawan Gupta (25), Vinay Sharma (26) and Akshay Singh (31).

The whole incident of Nirbhaya case came to limelight, after a 23-year-old paramedic student was brutally gang-raped and assaulted by six men in a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012 and was thrown out on the road. She later succumbed to her injuries at a Singapore hospital on December 29, 2012.