'It cannot be stated sufficiently strongly that the public life of persons in authority must never admit of such charges being even framed against them. If they can be made, then an inquiry whether to establish them or to clear the name of the person charged, is called for.'
The Delhi High Court’s action in holding the editor, the publisher, the resident editor, and a cartoonist of Mid Day (published from Delhi) guilty of contempt of court for making allegations of gross judicial misconduct against the former Chief Justice of India Y.K. Sabharwal and sentencing them to four months’ imprisonment raises several troubling issues.
The refusal of the Delhi High Court to examine the truthfulness or otherwise of the allegations against former Chief Justice of India Y.K. Sabharwal, published in Mid Day, has invited severe criticism from legal experts, who say the law of contempt has not been interpreted correctly Sentencing four scribes from the daily to four months imprisonment, the high court had said: "We need not go into the truth or otherwise of the allegations against the former Chief Justice of India as the same in any case cannot be a valid defence to justify the attack on the Supreme Court as such."
A GROUP of jurists and intellectuals said on Wednesday that they had official documents to prove that the companies run by the sons of former Chief Justice of India Y.K. Sabharwal benefited from out-of-turn allotment of institutional and industrial plots in Noida in 2004-06, at rates far below the market price.
The Constitution has vested the Supreme Court with the power to impose correctives on the executive and, in lesser measure, on the legislature. The more the power, the greater the responsibility that goes with it.
The documents are there and they bear out the sequence of events. It is not a matter of inference. The documents speak for themselves and these are all government documents.
a group of eminent citizens called a press conference in Delhi. They had an explosive story to share. A story that impacted thousands. A story that raised questions about judicial accountability few ever dare to raise.
Much as it’s desirable to find ever new ways of empowering citizens, law minister H R Bharadwaj seems to have gone overboard in introducing a Bill that equates a single citizen, however inadvertently, with 50 MPs from Rajya Sabha or 100 from Lok Sabha.
Apologise, SC tells journalist; Jly 26, 2007
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is learnt to have asked law minister H R Bharadwaj not to desist from giving the executive's inputs on judicial appointments recommended by collegiums — the panels of senior judges of high courts and Supreme Court.