The Madras High Court Bench here on Tuesday admitted a petition filed by a third party to review a judgment passed by it on February 22, 2013, upholding the validity of a 1994 High Court circular, which permitted the lower courts to write judgments in either English or Tamil and not Tamil alone.
A Division Bench of Justices V. Ramasubramanian and V.M. Velumani granted leave to the review petitioner P. Rathinam, a 68-year-old lawyer, to file the case, though he was not the litigant in the case decided last year. The judges also ordered notice, returnable by June 16, to the Registrar-General of the High Court.
The review petitioner said the Tamil Nadu Official Languages Act, 1956, was amended on November 12, 1976, and Sections 4-A and 4-B were introduced in it, thus declaring Tamil the language of all subordinate courts in the State for recording evidence as well as writing judgments, decrees and orders.
A Government Order was also issued on January 18, 1982, for bringing the two provisions into force. On April 21, 1994, a Full Bench of the High Court dismissed a batch of cases challenging the constitutional validity of the two Sections and held that there was nothing wrong in the judiciary following the official language of the State.
However, in the meantime, the High Court, on its administrative side, issued an official memorandum on January 5, 1994, exempting the lower courts from writing judgments in Tamil. “This memorandum has been in force for the last 20 years now without any effort being made to withdraw it,” he pointed out. In 2010, another lawyer Solai Subramanian challenged the validity of the memorandum through a public interest litigation petition. But a Division Bench of the High Court dismissed it on February 22, 2013, and hence the present review petition.
