New Delhi

The Supreme Court has said that personal liberty of a person is one of the oldest concepts to be purported by national courts, and by lodging juveniles in adult prisons amounts to deprivation of their personal liberty in multiple aspects.

A bench comprising Justices Surya Kant and JB Pardiwala said the concept of personal liberty has received a far more expansive interpretation and the notion accepted today is that liberty encompasses these rights and privileges which have long been recognised as being essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by a free man and not merely freedom from bodily restraint.

The bench noted that awareness about the rights of the child and correlated duties remain low among the functionaries of the juvenile justice system.

It emphasised that once a child is caught in the web of the adult criminal justice system, it is difficult for the child to get out of it unscathed.

"The bitter truth is that even the legal aid programmes are mired in systemic bottlenecks and often it is only at a considerably belated stage of the proceeding that the person becomes aware of the rights, including the right to be differently treated on the ground of juvenility", said the bench.

The top court made these observations while hearing a plea by a murder convict "who claimed to be a minor at the time of commission of the offence - undergoing life imprisonment."

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The petitioner, whose conviction was upheld by the apex court in 2016, sought directions to the Uttar Pradesh government for verification of his exact age.