‘Make medical care a fundamental right’

Supreme Court Judge K. S. Radhakrishnan has said that it is high time that medical assistance is incorporated into the Constitution as a fundamental right.

He was talking after inaugurating the Sree Narayana Law College, Poothotta, near here on Wednesday.

Wondering how many people could afford increasingly expensive medical treatment, Mr. Radhakrishnan recollected how the Supreme Court got the Central government to withdraw a circular denying second level treatment to HIV-affected in government hospitals who had their first level treatment in private hospitals.

The Supreme Court wrote to the Solicitor General on the issue on a letter received by the court registrar from an aggrieved person who was turned away by a government hospital without second level treatment citing the circular.

Stating that education is the biggest asset, the judge said that it’s an era in which legal education has to be taken very seriously.

Mr.Radhakrishnan urged law students to maintain a national and even international perspective.

Mr. Radhakrishnan said that law students should be competent and should be trained in keeping with the changing profile of the profession for which the service of quality faculty with national and international exposure should be ensured at law schools.

Lack of facilities, he said, should not be an excuse for mediocrity.

Mr. Radhakrishnan said that while law students in the State could stand their ground against their counterparts elsewhere in terms of legal knowledge, it was their lack of communication skills that often did them in.

He said that lawyers and judges from the State were highly respected elsewhere in the country.

He also recollected a recent decree passed by a Supreme Court bench involving him directing to identify and provide compulsory education under the Right to Education Act to children kept as domestic help.