A letter by the Delhi Police Crime Branch seeking information from search engine site Google on the 33 members of two WhatsApp groups following the January 2020 violence at JNU, has received a reply from the firm saying that such details can be furnished only when the police send them a Letter Rogatory under the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (MLAT).
Around 100 masked persons armed with sticks and rods had gone inside the university vandalising properties for around four hours on January 5, 2020, causing injuries to 36 students, teachers, and staff.
An FIR was lodged in the case and was transferred to the Crime Branch. No arrest has been made in the case so far.
The police wrote to WhatsApp and Google, requesting details of videos, photos and messages that were shared by the 33 students and members of the two WhatsApp groups — ‘Unity Against Left’ and ‘Friends of RSS’.
Message sharing application WhatsApp has denied sharing details. Google has recently sent a reply stating that the information requested associates to services offered by Google LLC, a company organised and operating in the US and governed by US laws. The firm said that they would protect the data but the data can be shared only after they receive a Letter Rogatory under the MLAT.
In such cases, “Google follows diplomatic processes established between the jurisdiction requesting the data and the government of the United States,” said a police source.
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What is Letter Rogatory and MLAT?
A Letter Rogatory is a formal appeal made to a foreign court seeking judicial support in probing an entity in another country.
While an MLAT is a contract between two or more countries for gathering and exchanging information to enforce public or criminal laws.
The Delhi police had shared with Google the email addresses of the 33 students and members of the two WhatsApp groups since they could not find any WhatsApp groups on the phones of students who were interrogated in connection with the university incident.
Police sources suggest that the suspects might have cleaned the chats, thus, police had contacted Google as they may likely be able to share the backup of WhatsApp messages to assist with the investigation.
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Delhi Police on January 9 last year has issued names of nine suspects, all students, of whom seven were known to be members of Left-student outfits, while the other two were from the RSS’s student outfit, the ABVP. although, the police had not named any such body about the case. After the incident, the police had registered an FIR and 20 personnel of the police’s Special Investigation Team had established a camp office inside the JNU administration block and Delhi university students were questioned later by police.