The Karnataka High Court has stayed the summons issued to an advocate who released a press note about the probe into the Dharmasthala secret burials case, and directed that no coercive action be taken against him until the next hearing.
The lawyer is representing a woman who claimed her daughter went missing in Dharmasthala in 2003, where a Special Investigation Team (SIT) recently conducted inspections after a whistleblower alleged that he had been forced to bury multiple bodies in the temple town.
Police had registered an FIR against the advocate on August 22 at Belthangady police station in Dakshina Kannada, accusing him of spreading false information, and later issued him a summons on September 1. He then moved the High Court, seeking to have the FIR quashed and to restrain the police from taking coercive steps against him, the Indian Express reported.
On September 4, a bench of Justice Sachin Magadum noted some of the Supreme Court's remarks during the hearing of a Special Leave Petition earlier this year.
The Supreme Court had observed at the time that advocates “who are engaged in their legal practice apart from their fundamental rights under Article 19(1)(g) of the Constitution of India, have certain rights and privileges guaranteed because of the fact that they are legal professionals and also due to statutory provisions like Section 132 of BSA (Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam)”.
Section 132 of the BSA protects the confidentiality of communications between advocates and their clients.
The High Court referred to a 2023 circular issued by the Enforcement Directorate (ED), which instructed its officers not to summon lawyers in violation of this provision. It further observed that in cases falling under the exceptions to Section 132, any summons could only be issued with the ED Director’s approval.
Granting temporary relief to the lawyer, the court fixed October 8 as the date for the next hearing.
The case stems from allegations made by a former sanitation worker, who claimed that he had buried several unidentified bodies linked to suspicious deaths in Dharmasthala between 1995 and 2014. On July 11, he gave a statement before a magistrate’s court in Belthangady.
Following this, the government constituted an SIT, which began searches for human remains on July 29. Out of 13 sites identified by the worker, the team recovered only partial skeletal remains of one body. Later, the police arrested the whistleblower after finding discrepancies in his testimony during interrogation.