The Supreme Court has rejected gangster Abu Salem’s plea seeking premature release from imprisonment in connection with the 1993 Mumbai serial blasts case, bringing into sharp focus the difficult legal intersection between life imprisonment, remission, extradition assurances and India’s international obligations. A Bench of Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta upheld the Bombay High Court’s refusal to release Salem, holding that the 25-year period arising from the sovereign assurance given by India to Portugal cannot be further reduced by adding ordinary jail-earned remission to the period of actual incarceration.
The ruling is significant because the Supreme Court was not simply called upon to decide whether Salem had spent a substantial period in custody. The more precise question was whether the 25-year ceiling flowing from India’s assurance to Portugal should itself be treated as a fixed sentence capable of further reduction through remission, or whether it operates as the outer limit within which the Union Government must exercise its statutory and constitutional powers to bring Salem’s imprisonment into conformity with the assurance. The Court adopted the latter understanding.
The controversy has its origins in Salem’s extradition from Portugal. India had assured the Portuguese Government in December 2002 that, if Salem were extradited to India for trial, he would not be subjected to the death penalty or imprisonment beyond 25 years. After a prolonged extradition process, Salem was brought to India in November 2005. He subsequently faced prosecution in two separate TADA proceedings, including the 1993 Bombay blasts case and the 1995 murder of Mumbai builder Pradeep Jain. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Jain murder case in February 2015 and again sentenced to life imprisonment in the Bombay blasts case in September 2017, with the sentences directed to operate concurrently.
The extradition assurance assumed decisive importance because Salem’s offences were of a nature that could potentially have attracted a much harsher punishment. The Supreme Court, while dealing with his earlier challenge in 2022, recognised the binding significance of the assurance given to Portugal. The Court did not, however, simply substitute a 25-year fixed-term sentence for the life sentences imposed by the competent criminal court. Instead, it directed the Central Government to undertake the necessary remission exercise so that Salem’s incarceration would remain consistent with the assurance given to the extraditing State.
That distinction became the foundation of the present proceedings. Salem argued that the 25-year period had effectively already expired because his calculation included the period spent as an undertrial, the period following conviction and the remission earned for good conduct in prison. According to his case, when these components were taken together, his custody had crossed the 25-year threshold and his continued detention consequently became unlawful.
The argument was placed before the Supreme Court through a considerably more nuanced legal route. Senior Advocate Rishi Malhotra, appearing for Salem, contended that the period spent in custody as an undertrial could not be ignored and that the benefit of remission earned through good conduct was legally distinct from the discretionary remission contemplated under Section 432 of the Code of Criminal Procedure. The submission was therefore that Salem was not asking the Court to grant him a fresh remission; rather, he was asking that the remission already earned under the prison rules be recognised while calculating the 25-year period.
The argument sought to draw an important distinction between earned remission and executive remission. Prison rules may provide remission for good conduct and other specified circumstances, whereas Section 432 CrPC confers a broader statutory power upon the appropriate government to remit the whole or part of a sentence. Salem’s position was that his claim did not depend upon the discretionary exercise of Section 432 because the benefit had already accrued through prison rules.
The Supreme Court, however, declined to accept that conceptual separation as sufficient to advance his release. The Court examined the manner in which Salem had calculated his custody and found a fundamental problem: the computation resulted in double counting of a period of incarceration.
Salem had treated the period beginning with his arrest in November 2005 and ending with his conviction in September 2017 as undertrial custody, while simultaneously calculating a period of post-conviction custody beginning in February 2015, when he was convicted in the separate murder case. The two periods therefore overlapped between February 2015 and September 2017. Since the sentences in the two cases were directed to run concurrently, the same period could not be counted twice to artificially enlarge the aggregate period of imprisonment.
This part of the judgment is important beyond the facts of Salem’s case. Concurrent sentences do not create parallel custody periods for the purpose of generating duplicate credit. A prisoner physically remains in custody for one period of time, even where more than one sentence is operating against him. The legal effect of concurrency is generally that the sentences run together rather than consecutively. It cannot logically mean that a single day spent in custody becomes two days merely because two proceedings produced separate convictions.
The Supreme Court therefore rejected the computation advanced by Salem and reiterated the temporal framework already recognised in its 2022 decision. The relevant period for the 25-year assurance was not to be manipulated through overlapping calculations. The Court treated the date from which the 25-year period was required to be reckoned as already settled by its earlier judgment.
The more substantial issue, however, concerned remission.
The Supreme Court made it clear that the 25-year assurance should not be understood as an ordinary fixed-term sentence which could subsequently be reduced by every form of remission available under prison law. This is where the judgment acquires considerable constitutional and international-law significance. The 25-year ceiling was not originally created by the sentencing court as an independent statutory sentence. It arose because the Government of India had given a sovereign assurance to Portugal in the context of extradition, and the Supreme Court subsequently required the executive to honour that assurance within the framework of Indian law.
The distinction is subtle but legally crucial. Salem was convicted of offences for which the criminal courts imposed life imprisonment. The Supreme Court’s intervention did not erase those convictions or transform the nature of the sentence into a conventional 25-year term. Rather, it recognised that India’s international undertaking constrained the manner in which that life sentence could be enforced after extradition.
In other words, the sovereign assurance operates as a ceiling on incarceration, not as a new statutory sentence carrying all the characteristics of an ordinary fixed-term imprisonment.
This distinction explains why the Court refused to allow ordinary prison remission to be used to bring the date of release below the 25-year period contemplated by the assurance. The Bombay High Court had reached substantially the same conclusion in April 2026, holding that the sovereign assurance itself had already conferred a significant benefit upon Salem by preventing imprisonment beyond 25 years despite the life sentences imposed upon him. Allowing ordinary earned remission to reduce that period further would effectively create a second reduction on top of the concession already necessitated by the extradition arrangement.
The reasoning also addresses an important misunderstanding about the expression “25 years”. It does not mean that Salem was sentenced to 25 years in the conventional sense. The underlying punishment remains life imprisonment. The 25-year period emerges from the legal consequences of the extradition assurance and the Supreme Court’s directions for ensuring that India’s treatment of the prisoner remains consistent with that assurance.
That distinction matters because remission ordinarily operates upon a sentence. If the 25-year period itself is not the original sentence but the maximum period of incarceration that the Union Government undertook to ensure, the argument that every earned remission must automatically be deducted from that ceiling becomes considerably weaker.
The Court consequently refused to treat the remission accumulated by Salem under the Maharashtra prison rules as a mechanism for advancing the date by which the sovereign assurance would be exhausted. The judgment therefore preserves the distinction between remission of a sentence and compliance with an externally arising maximum period of imprisonment.
This is also why the Court was unwilling to mechanically apply precedents relied upon by Salem concerning remission. Those cases operated within the ordinary framework of sentencing and prison remission. The present controversy was materially different because it involved a sovereign assurance given in an extradition context and subsequently incorporated into the Supreme Court’s directions. The Court found that precedents concerning ordinary remission could not simply be transplanted into that distinct legal setting.
The decision must also be understood against the background of the Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling. That judgment had already resolved a significant part of the legal controversy by recognising India’s obligation arising from the assurance given to Portugal. At the same time, the Court had expressly refrained from treating the assurance as an automatic judicial commutation of Salem’s life sentence. Instead, it required the Central Government to exercise the appropriate powers of remission so that the sentence would conform to India’s international commitment.
This allocation of responsibility between the judiciary and executive is constitutionally significant. Courts impose and interpret sentences, while the executive possesses specified remission powers under criminal procedure and constitutional provisions. In Salem’s case, the Supreme Court’s role was to ensure that the executive could not disregard the international commitment made by India, without itself assuming the entire statutory function of the remission authority.
The present decision maintains that institutional division. It does not grant Salem a fresh remission, nor does it judicially reduce his life sentence below the 25-year period. Instead, it holds that the executive process contemplated by the earlier judgment must operate within the parameters already established.
The Bombay High Court had similarly concluded that the 25-year period had not yet expired and that the executive’s formal obligation to undertake the remission exercise would arise at the stage identified by the Supreme Court. The High Court consequently rejected the contention that Salem’s custody had already become illegal merely because prison remission had accrued.
The case also raises a larger question about the relationship between international assurances and domestic criminal law. Extradition is not merely a bilateral administrative arrangement for transferring an accused person from one country to another. The requested State must be able to assure the extraditing State that the individual will be treated consistently with the conditions upon which extradition is granted. Where the requesting State gives a solemn undertaking concerning punishment, that undertaking can subsequently become relevant to the legality of continued incarceration.
The Supreme Court’s 2022 intervention demonstrated precisely this principle. India could not seek extradition by assuring Portugal that Salem would not face imprisonment beyond 25 years and then disregard that assurance after obtaining custody of the prisoner. International cooperation in criminal justice depends substantially upon the credibility of such undertakings.
At the same time, the present decision illustrates that an international assurance does not operate in a legal vacuum. It must be implemented through Indian constitutional and statutory mechanisms. The Court therefore did not simply announce an automatic release date. Instead, it directed the executive to employ the powers available under Indian law to reconcile the life sentence with the 25-year ceiling.
There is consequently a delicate balance between international comity and domestic sentencing law. India must honour the commitment that secured Salem’s extradition, but it must do so through constitutionally recognised mechanisms. The present judgment preserves that balance rather than allowing either international obligations or prison-remission rules to operate in isolation.
Another significant aspect is the Court’s treatment of good conduct in prison. Salem claimed that he had earned more than three years of remission on account of his conduct and that such remission should be credited towards the 25-year period. The Court’
