Bench dismisses PIL against declaration of assets by judges

The Madras High Court Bench here has dismissed a public interest litigation petition filed by a lawyer to prevent the Centre from tabling the Bills on Fixation of Accountability of Judges, Judges to Disclose their Assets and Judges Inquiry in the Parliament.

A Division Bench of Justice D. Murugesan and Justice S. Nagamuthu said that tabling, debating and passing the Bills were entirely within the realm of the Parliament and any direction even to consider the petitioner’s representation would lead to interference with the wisdom and powers of the Parliament.

The Judges further said that issuing a writ of mandamus to the Cabinet Secretary and other officials to consider a representation made by the petitioner, as sought by him, would amount to indirectly ordering the government not to table any such Bills besides issuing directions to the legislature not to enact laws.

Writing the judgement, Mr. Justice Murugesan said: “We, the people of India, have given ourselves a well-built document, namely the Constitution of India. That document assigns different roles to three wings of the governance, namely the Legislature, Executive and Judiciary.”

He went on to state that whether a particular law should be enacted or not was entirely the function of the Legislature and the Courts have no say on it except to scrutinise the legislations in exercise of the power of judicial review only to find out whether those laws were within the framework of the Constitution.

Earlier, petitioner’s counsel W. Peter Ramesh Kumar said that attempts to table the Bills relating to judges were a direct interference in the independent functioning of the judiciary. He said it was imperative to forbear the government from bringing about any sort of curbs under the guise of progressive legislations or reforms in the higher judiciary.