The Supreme Court bench comprising justices Madan B Lokur and RK Agrawal disapproved strongly of the non-implementation of Food Security Act by certain States including Gujarat.
As part of the assessments, 20,000 RTI applications filed to different public authorities in the country were collected, of which detailed analysis of a randomly selected sample of 5000 applications was undertaken.
BY SHAILESH GANDHI ON 07/10/2015 The RTI law is being amended by the court without any reasoning and unless this is reversed, the Right to Information could slowly be emasculated
Rule of law has meant different things to different people at different times. This prompted constitutional historian Ivor Jennings to characterise it as “an unruly horse”.
Your book “Informal Constitution” is timely. Did you anticipate that the non-appointment of a nominee of the collegium to the judgeship of the Supreme Court would become controversial?
Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer (1914-2014) had a unique judicial philosophy, a quality that stemmed from his belief that law evolved through diverse views and that flashes of collision brought out the truth and justice. By V. VENKATESAN
THE India Against Corruption movement started in 2012 culminated in the formation of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). By venturing into electoral arena, the AAP challenged the established political parties and promised to fight corruption, if voted to power.
The government’s attempt to restore the predominant voice of the political class through the Judicial Appointments Commission is a recipe for disaster
The deplorably small number of judgments by Justice Cyriac Joseph, especially when courts have a huge backlog of cases, is valid enough reason for concern at his suitability for the National Human Rights Commission
Among the areas of reform that need urgent attention are appointment of judges, working of the judicial system, and restoring the independence of government law officers
The judgment in Kesavananda Bharati v State of Kerala, whose 40th anniversary falls today, was crucial in upholding the supremacy of the Constitution and preventing authoritarian rule by a single party
Has public interest litigation lost its direction and abandoned its original constituency, the marginalised and the underprivileged sections of society?
Increasing workload, a higher rate of admission, and constitution of multiple two-judge Division Benches have resulted in a huge increase in the number of judgments handed down by the Supreme Court, which again increases the probability of inconsistencies in judgments.
Criteria that were never conceived in the Constituent Assembly now determine who gets to sit on India’s apex court. Each of these unwritten qualifications, age, seniority, and diversity, is problematic in its present form. By ABHINAV CHANDRACHUD Frontline May 3 2013
Of all the promises made in the Constitution, the most important are the promises of the ‘right to life’, the ‘right to dignity’, the ‘right to personal liberty’ and the ‘right to bodily integrity and health’.
IN his classic book Politics of the Judiciary, first published in 1977, Professor J.A.G. Griffith exposed the myth of judicial neutrality in the United Kingdom. Griffith, who passed away on May 8, 2010, at the age of 91, had many admirers, among them India's own nonagenarian jurist, Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer. Citing Griffith, Justice Iyer wrote in The Hindu recently that to have political views and beliefs is not a form of guilt; to hide it is guilt.
Since it alters the entire mechanism for investigating allegations of misbehaviour against members of the higher judiciary and simplifies the procedure for their removal, the Judicial Standards and Accountability Bill is a hugely significant piece of legislation. The proposed law, which seeks to replace the outmoded Judges Inquiry Act 1968, under which cumbersome impeachment trials are necessary to dismiss erring judges, lays down enforceable norms for their conduct and enables a wider range of disciplinary action for proven misbehaviour.
On August 18, 2012, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, speaking at the 150th year celebrations of the Bombay High Court, said the government was in favour of raising the age of retirement of High Court judges. Presently, Supreme Court judges retire at 65 and High Court judges at 62.
A commission to select judges will be an improvement on the collegium only if its members are of the highest standing
Wide consultation, rather than the closed-door deliberations of the collegium, is what the Supreme Court and the High Courts need
Tax avoidance through artificial devices — holding companies, subsidiaries, treaty shopping and selling valuable properties indirectly by entering into a maze of framework agreements — has become a very lucrative industry today.
The Dinakaran episode has brought to the surface the vexed problem of the arbitrary and totally unsatisfactory manner of selecting and appointing judges as well as the unresolved problem of dealing with complaints of misconduct and corruption against judges. In this bracing article Prashant Bhushan analyses these long simmering twin problems which lie at the heart of Judicial Accountablity
The judiciary is the most sublime instrumentality in the country and I have served it for nearly a decade during the best part of my life. This article, written out of reverence for the judicature, has a benign intent meant to arrest its corruption and decline now creeping into its vitals.
A few weeks ago, one of India’s finest judges, Chief Justice A.P. Shah, retired from judicial office
at the age of 62.
This is yet another supersession of judges, not in the technical sense but in all other respects. Justice A.P. Shah, who retired from the office of Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court a week ago, was one of the finest judges in the country. He was also the senior most.
The study was conducted through secondary data collection, by a core group at the Campaign for Judicial Accountability & Reform. It was conducted over 3-4 months in the last quarter of 2009.
Justice AP Shah, responsible for such landmark judgments as the one on consensual gay sex, retired as Chief Justice of Delhi High Court after being overlooked for promotion to the Supreme Court.
A Supreme Court of India, and a Supreme Court for all Indians: these two versions can be radically different in terms of principle and content.
Chief Justice of India (CJI) K.G. Balakrishnan completed three years in office on January 13 and will retire on May 11.
THE Indian Supreme Court has a reputation for being a “people’s court” or, as one judge put it, a “last resort for the oppressed and bewildered”.
Justice A.P. Shah’s judgment in the Delhi high court on the applicability of the Right to Information (RTI) Act is as fine as any bench of the Supreme Court could deliver.
When justice is denied by any society, including a socialist, secular and democratic one as in India, expectations darken into depression.
NEW DELHI: While sharing a dais with Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan, senior advocate Fali Nariman recently attacked the Supreme Court collegium for its failure to promote the author of the historic homosexuality verdict, chief justice of the Delhi high court A P Shah.
Thanks to legal professionals the world around, the ‘dead’ language of Latin remains happily alive.
It is a well-settled principle of law that the presence of a conflict of interest — actual or potential — is sufficient to disqualify judges from participating in legal proceedings.
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Chief Justice of India Sabyasachi Mukharji’s advice to Justice Ramaswami to desist from discharging judicial functions so long as investigations continued is worthy of emulation.
THE Supreme Court’s collegium comprising the Chief Justice of India (CJI) and four senior judges, which recommends appointees to the Supreme Court, exercises a crucial responsibility.
Little did Subash Chandra Agrawal know that his RTI petition would create a first in history. His request two years ago, seeking information on whether judges were filing details of their assets under their 1997 inhouse resolution to do so, has brought about such a turn that for the first time, the Supreme Court of India has knocked at the doors of a High Court seeking a relook into one of its orders.
WHEN SPECIAL CBI judge Rama Jain received an anonymous letter in January 2008, telling her that the provident funds of Class 3 and Class 4 employees of the Ghaziabad court were being siphoned off, she had no idea that she had stumbled onto the biggest judicial scam in the history of independent India.