In an indication that the deadlock between the collegium and the Centre over the procedure to appoint judges to the Supreme Court and High Courts may be coming to an end, Chief Justice of India T.S. Thakur on Wednesday said differences of opinion with government are being sorted out and the Memorandum of Procedure (MoP) may be finalised in the next two weeks.
The government had referred its latest draft of the MoP to the Collegium for approval on August 3. Once the MoP is finalised, the collegium would send the document back to the government for notification.
Chief Justice Thakur conveyed to reporters that there had been some debate on four or five areas in the government’s MoP.
Cautious noteGovernment sources sounded cautious while reacting to Chief Justice Thakur’s words and restricted themselves to saying that “we are working it out”.
Chief Justice Thakur conveyed this at the sidelines of the 2nd Justice J.S. Verma Memorial Lecture organised by the News Broadcasters Association under the chairmanship of former Supreme Court judge Justice R.V. Raveendran. Incidentally, Justice Verma moulded the Collegium system of judicial appointments in the Second Judges Case of 1993.
“It was Justice Verma who laid out the foundation for the Collegium system... the now much maligned Collegium system,” Chief Justice Thakur said in his memorial lecture to an audience comprising among others, Supreme Court judges and senior lawyers.
On October 16, 2015, a five-judge Bench breathed life into the Collegium system of judges appointing judges by scrapping the government’s National Judicial Appointments Commission laws which gave equal role to politicians in judicial appointments.
Bone of contentionThe MoP had been the cause of a prolonged stalemate between the Collegium and the government ever since the Supreme Court directed the latter to draft it in a judgment on December 16, 2015.
The latest draft highlights the process of judicial appointments as a “transparent and broad-based” exercise involving not just a handful of senior judges but their brethren, the Chief Ministers and top law officers of the Centre and the States.
It wants all Supreme Court and High Court judges to be able to recommend names to their respective collegiums. It has recommended Chief Ministers to have the right to suggest names to the respective High Court collegiums. Similarly, Attorney General should be allowed recommend the names of judges to the Supreme Court and Advocate-General of States to their respective State High Courts.
Appraisal committeesThe draft details a mechanism for an elaborate vetting process of names recommended for High Court judgeship through appraisal committees made up of sitting or retired judges, jurists and academicians at both Supreme Court and High Court levels. The government has further asked the judiciary to fix an age for High Court judgeship and make it “non-flexible”. It also wants the mechanism for redressing complaints against judges to remain within the judiciary.
