An incident that occurred in a Lisbon court on 15 January, involving a person of Indian origin went barely noticed. Sabrina De Sousa, a former CIA employee was prevented from boarding a flight at Lisbon airport in October 2015 because of a 2009 conviction (“in absentia”) by an Italian court. She was on her way to Goa to see her 89-year-old mother. On 15 January, the Portuguese Court decided that she should be sent to Italy to serve her six year prison sentence. She is planning to appeal, but the outcome seems to be uncertain knowing the rigid European Union legal system.
This episode should convey vital lessons to those in government who loosely talk about more aggressive “covert” operations without providing even basic legal protection to our intelligence agencies. The UPA government failed to consider this in 2014-15 when the CBI wanted to prosecute some IB officers. Even the NDA government has not given it much thought. They have pushed the issue under the carpet by refusing to give sanction to prosecute.
In 2011 former UPA minister Manish Tewari had introduced a private bill, ‘The Intelligence Services – Powers & Regulation – Bill 2011’ in the parliament, trying to codify the functioning of our intelligence agencies by specifying their charter and accountability. Unfortunately, the UPA government failed to move this bill which would have given legal protection to our intelligence agency to some extent.