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Category: Societal Issues
Date Submitted: 03/13/2011 08:21 PM
http://www.flonnet.com/stories/20100212270304300.htm
THE JUDICIARY
Trying times
V. VENKATESAN The Supreme Court faces new challenges in the wake of certain developments
V.V. KRISHNAN
K.G. Balakrishnan, Chief Justice of India, who is retiring in May. Chief Justice of India (CJI) K.G. Balakrishnan completed three years in office on January 13 and will retire on May 11. In the last four months of his term he will face perhaps the most daunting challenge of his career: that of restoring the people’s faith in the Supreme Court, which has been dented by several developments in the recent past. The first major challenge will be a response of the Supreme Court, which completes 60 years of its existence on January 26, to the Delhi High Court’s judgment saying that the CJI’s office was covered by the Right to Information Act (RTIA). The CJI had openly disagreed with such an interpretation. The verdict was delivered on January 12 by a three-judge Bench of Chief Justice A.P. Shah and Justices Vikramajit Sen and S. Muralidhar. It came on an appeal by the Secretary General of the Supreme Court against a judgment delivered by Justice Ravindra Bhat of the Delhi High Court on September 2 last year. Justice Bhat had directed the Central Public Information Officer (CPIO) of the Supreme Court to provide the information sought by an applicant under the RTIA, Subhash Chandra Agrawal, about the declaration of assets by judges of the Supreme Court.
The three-judge Bench agreed with Justice Bhat that the expression “public authority” as used in the RTI Act had wide amplitude and included an authority created by or under the Constitution, which included the office of the CJI. The Supreme Court, in its appeal, contended that Agrawal had no right to information regarding declarations made by judges of the Supreme Court pursuant to a 1997 resolution, passed by a Full Court meeting, requiring the judges to declare their assets to the CJI. Specifically, Attorney General G.E....