Judicial secret out in open - Former judge skewers appointment process

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Judicial secret out in open - Former judge skewers appointment process

SAMANWAYA RAUTRAY

New Delhi, Nov. 10: Former Supreme Court judge Ruma Pal today tore into the process of appointment of judges to the Supreme Court and the high courts and the lack of an embedded mechanism to ensure judicial accountability. Pal, a widely respected jurist not known to mince words, chose to put a caveat to her words: she was speaking from the “safe haven of retirement”. “The process of appointment of judges to the superior courts was possibly the best kept secret of the country,” she said. Judges’ appointments are now initiated and cleared by a collegium of the four senior-most judges and the Chief Justice of India for the Supreme Court and three senior judges and the chief justice for a high court. Since 1993, the executive’s role has been to dutifully appoint those cleared by the collegium. The executive can return the names but has to appoint the judges if the collegium clears the list again. Pal said the criticism of appointments by the executive to the judiciary applied equally well to appointments made by judges to the judiciary. The “mystique” of the process, the small base from which the selections were made and the “secrecy and confidentiality” ensured that the “process may, on occasions, make wrong appointments and, worse still, lend itself to nepotism”, she said. An indiscreet comment or a chance rumour was enough to rule out a person’s perceived suitability for the post, she said. Friendships and obligations also sometimes colour recommendations, she added. Consensus in the collegium is often arrived at by “trade-offs”, she said, with “disastrous effects”. Pal also lamented the growing “sycophancy” and “lobbying” which colour these appointments. These appointments, she said, should be done by a judicial commission of non-partisan members. Unless the process is made transparent and the resource pool widened and some objective criteria laid down, “arbitrariness” in appointments will remain, she said. There has been a good deal of talk in recent years on the judicial accountability and standards bill but it is still pending. It proposes a judicial commission made of people from all walks of life and strong representation from the executive. Pal was delivering the fifth V.M. Tarkunde memorial lecture here. Tarkunde, considered the father of the human rights movement in the country, was a lawyer in the Bombay Bar. He became a high court judge but later gave up the post to don black robes again. Tarkunde was never elevated to the Supreme Court because of extraneous reasons, speakers at the lecture said. His landmark judgment, that a person was entitled to a passport as a matter of right under Article 21 of the Constitution (right to life and liberty), was later adopted by the Supreme Court in the Maneka Gandhi case. Pal also listed several sins of the judiciary (see chart). She called for a judicially “embedded” strong mechanism to ensure accountability. Any non-judicial mechanism will impinge on the judiciary’s independence, she said. The current solutions adopted by the judiciary — which give the CJI only the power to transfer, or not allot work, to erring judges — were inadequate and ad hoc, she said. She described the increasing tribunalisation (the executive decision to set up specialised tribunals) as a serious encroachment on the judiciary’s independence. The judiciary, she said, had been “timorous” in not fighting these tribunals that force it to share its adjudicating powers with the executive. A government law that bars judges from foreign travel even at their own cost also came in for attack. This ensures that judges are obliged to the secretaries in various departments, she said.