Indian Kanoon - Search engine for Indian Law

9. Learned counsel for the petitioners has drawn our attention to various judgments on the question of subjective satisfaction, which the authorities under detention laws are required to record.

10. In Shalini Soni v. Union of India and Ors., while dealing with Article 22(5) of the Constitution of India, the Supreme Court noted that there were two facets to this Article and the following observation of the Supreme Court would be profitable.

"It is an unwritten rule of the law, constitutional and administrative, that whenever a decision making function is entrusted to the subjective satisfaction of a statutory functionary, there is an implicit obligation to apply his mind to pertinent and proximate matters only, eschewing the irrelevant and the remote. Where there is further an express statutory obligation to communicate not merely the decision that (but also) the grounds on which the decision is founded, it is a necessary corollary that the grounds communicated, that is, the grounds so made known, should be seen to pertain to pertinent and proximate matters and should comprise all the constituent facts and materials that went in to make up the mind of the statutory functionary and not merely the inferential conclusions."