Contrary to what the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court recently said, the Right to Information Act does cover ‘constitutional authorities.’

PEOPLE HAVE every right to seek details of a judge's wealth, allegations of misconduct against him and appointments in the judiciary, according to a parliamentary panel. "Except judicial decision-making, all other activities of administration and persons included in the judiciary are subject to the RTI Act," said the report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Law and Justice, tabled in the Rajya Sabha on Tuesday.

Except judicial decision making, judiciary under RTI Act New Delhi, Apr 29 (PTI) A parliamentary committee today held that judiciary comes under the purview of the Right to Information law with regard to all activities of administration except "judicial decision making".

Top jurists on Thursday slammed Chief Justice of India KG Balakrishnan for “trying to undermine the importance of transparency in the judiciary” by refusing to make public details of assets of Supreme Court and high court judges.

Amidst growing demands from various quarters of the society for declaration of assets by judges, Chief Justice of India KG Balakrishnan on Wednesday said that they have already done it. However, he refused to make the details public.

Why won’t judges of India’s Supreme Court and High Courts be willing to declare their wealth when their counterparts in other democracies such as the United States and the United Kingdom do it as a routine?

When Supreme Court judges adopted a resolution a decade ago to make a periodic declaration of their assets to the Chief Justice of India, they took care to state that the details of their holdings would not be made public.

We take the optimistic view that successive Chief Justices of India shall he nceforth act in accordance with the Second Judge's case and this opinion,' Justice S.E Bharucha said on October 28, 1998, delivering the Supreme Court's advisory opinion on the President's Reference. The Court ruled in that case (in 1993) that the CJI must consult two other judges before recommending judges for appointment to the Supreme Court and the High Courts. Justice Bharucha himself ignored the court's rulings after he became CJI on November 1, 2001.

A day after the Supreme Court refused to order a judicial inquiry into the allegations of misconduct against former Chief Justice of India YK Sabharwal, top jurists said on Tuesday, that many legal options were available to initiate a probe into the matter.

In 1993, a nine -judge bench of the Supreme Court laid down a new system for making appointments of judges to the high courts and Supreme Court. This system gave enormous powers to a collegium of senior judges of the Supreme Court to select and make recommendations to the government for these appointments.

The stature of the judicature is so high and its powers so wide that any action designed to debunk, defile or denigrate the great dignity and impartial integrity of the institution is regarded as an invasion on the people’s faith in the court’s fearless, biasfree, favour-free functionalism and its solemn credibility as a constitutional
instrumentality of justice.

Scandals can be fun. Especially those that knock preachers from their pulpits and flick halos off saintly heads. But some scandals can be corrosive and more damaging for the scandalised than the scandalee. Right now we're in the midst of one such.

Are judges special or is justice special? To put it differently, can you criticise a judge without imperiling the sanctity of justice? This is the core concern at the heart of the debate whether freedom of speech should have primacy over the law on contempt.

In a dramatic throwback to civil disobedience, over 30 prominent persons have decided to “court contempt” daring the judiciary to punish them along with Mid Day journalists for making allegations against former Chief Justice Y K Sabharwal.

'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.