Ghaziabad Incident: UP Bar Council calls for statewide protest on Monday

The Uttar Pradesh Bar Council on Monday called for a boycott of demonstrations and works across the state to express its outrage over the allegation of cane attack on lawyers at a courthouse in Ghaziabad.

The Bar Council also formed a five-member committee to investigate the incident and submit a report.

The incident took place on October 29 in the courtroom of the Ghaziabad district magistrate during a bail hearing.

Uttar Pradesh Bar Council Chairman Shiv Kishore Gaur on Saturday said the Bar Council has called for a statewide demonstration and boycott on Monday to protest against the encumbrances of lawyers in the Ghaziabad court.

The Bar Council also demanded the transfer of the district judge.

The five-member committee constituted by the Bar Council includes Rohitashwa Kumar Agarwal, Madhusudan Tripathi, Arun Kumar Tripathi, Ajay Yadav and Prashant Singh ‘Atal’.

The Bar Council will take further action on the matter on Monday.

“The Oudh Bar Association of the Lucknow High Court has convened a meeting on Sunday to discuss the issue,” said Manoj Kumar Dwivedi, general secretary of the Oudh Bar Association.

Meanwhile, the Central Bar Association (CBA) and the Lucknow Bar Association have convened a meeting of all bar organizations from across the state on Sunday in the state capital.

Anurag Srivastava, joint secretary of the CBA, on Saturday said that the president and general secretaries of the bar associations will be present at the meeting.

“The future course of action will be decided at this meeting,” Srivastava said.

In the recent past, the Ghaziabad incident was the second incident in which human rights activists clashed with police officers.

Police filed charges against lawyers in Hapur on August 29, 2023, when they protested against registering a case against a woman lawyer and her father following an encounter between the woman lawyer and the police while she was traveling to Ghaziabad in her car. .

Lawyers across the state went on strike from the next day, which lasted for more than a month.

Principal Standing Advocate (III) Akhilesh Awasthi resigned from his post to register his protest over the Hapur incident even as the Allahabad high court expressed concern over the lawyers’ strike.