Rafale review petition: 'Security of state supersedes everything,' government tells Supreme Court

Attorney General KK Venugopal told the Supreme Court Thursday that the "security of state supersedes everything". The court is hearing a review petition of its earlier judgement in the Rafale case which had said the deal did not need to be investigated for corruption. 

The review petition has been filed by former union ministers Arun Shourie and Yashwant Sinha, and the lawyer Prashant Bhushan. 

Their petition includes documents which the government says were stolen from the Defence Ministry. On Thursday, Venugopal told the court that it should direct the removal of the "leaked pages" from the review petition since the government was claiming privilege over the documents. 

"What privilege do you (attorney general) claim? They have already produced them (the documents) in court," the court said. 

"They have produced it after stealing it," Venugopal replied. 

"State documents can't be published without explicit permission," he added. 

The Supreme Court then said to Venugopal that the RTI Act can override even the Official Secrets Act since Section 22 and Section 24 of the RTI Act says "even intelligence and security establishments bound to give information about corruption and human rights violations". 

To which Venugopal replied: "Security of state supersedes everything." 

The court on Thursday reserves its order on the Centre claiming privilege over the allegedly leaked documents.