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New Delhi: A group of US lawmakers has expressed \u201ccontinued concern\u201d over the prolonged pre-trial detention of student activist and scholar Umar Khalid and urged Indi that he be granted bail.<\/p>\n
According to Kashmir Media Service, Members of the US Congress and Senate in a letter written to India\u2019s Ambassador in Washington, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, said Umar Khalid\u2019s confinement in jail for nearly five years in connection with the February 2020 northeast Delhi violence \u201craises serious questions about due process, human rights and India\u2019s obligations under international law\u201d.<\/p>\n
The letter has been signed by senior Democratic leaders, including Congressman James P. McGovern and Jamie Raskin, Senators Chris Van Hollen and Peter Welch, and Congress members Pramila Jayapal, Jan Schakowsky, Rashida Tlaib and Lloyd Doggett.<\/p>\n
Besides Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, Gulfisha Fatima, Meera Haider, Shifa Ur Rehman and Muhammad Saleem Khan are in jail for over five years.<\/p>\n
The US lawmakers said both countries, as the world\u2019s largest democracies, shared a common responsibility to uphold freedom, rule of law, human rights and pluralism. \u201cIt is in this spirit that we raise the following concerns,\u201d the letter said.<\/p>\n
The lawmakers traced the origins of the case to the protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) passed in late-2019, which, they noted, were described by a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights as \u201cfundamentally discriminatory\u201d. They said rights organisations, legal experts and the international media had consistently questioned the fairness of the investigations and trials. The lawmakers argued that the invocation of terrorism charges against Khalid rested on \u201csecret witnesses and misconstrued speech\u201d, and pointed out that independent rights investigations had found no evidence linking him to terror activity.<\/p>\n
While noting the matter was currently under consideration before the Supreme Court, the lawmakers welcomed the temporary bail granted to Khalid for sister\u2019s wedding.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
New Delhi: A group of US lawmakers has expressed \u201ccontinued concern\u201d over the prolonged pre-trial detention of student activist and scholar Umar Khalid and urged Indi that he be granted bail. According to Kashmir Media Service, Members of the US Congress and Senate in a letter written to India\u2019s Ambassador in Washington, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":191630,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-191629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-india"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/assests\/2026\/01\/umer-khalid.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191629"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191629\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":191666,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191629\/revisions\/191666"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kmsnews.org\/kms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}