Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant, on Monday, said the mechanism developed by the Supreme Court and high courts to deal with complaints against judges was “robust”, “very responsive” and timely. Delivering the keynote address at the 6th Ram Jethmalani Memorial Lecture on “Justice Seen to Be Done: Transparency and Public Trust as Pillars of the Legal System”, the CJI said reform must be the rule and no institution can survive or take pride in remaining static.
“All that I wish to say that with respect to the other administrative reforms, that how the complaints are being dealt with, as the Chief Justice of India, I can say with full confidence that the mechanism which the Supreme Court and the high courts have developed is one of the robust, very responsive, and very timely also,” Justice Kant said.
He said senior advocates Mahesh Jethmalani and Harish Salve, who also spoke at the event, had raised some questions of “seminal public importance” regarding the administrative reforms that any institution might require, adding that the judiciary was no exception.
In his address, Mahesh Jethmalani referred to the controversy surrounding allegations of cash being discovered at the official residence of former Delhi High Court judge Justice Yashwant Varma last year.
“We, without any hesitation, acknowledge that reform must be the rule. No institution can survive and feel proud to be static. But then there are issues that may not be prudent to respond from a public platform,” the CJI said.
He said a judge, while passing an interlocutory order or a final decree, will invite a complaint at every stage.
“… It’s a very seriously debatable issue that should those complaints, every complaint be brought on a platform, on a website, or you need to have an internal very strong mechanism which must with complete objectivity, dispassionate approach and in a very responsible manner, must deal with it,” the CJI said.
“I can assure that such a mechanism is well established, but it is always subject to the reforms and qualitative improvement,” he said.
Justice Varma, who was facing impeachment proceedings for his removal over allegations of corruption after wads of burnt currency notes were recovered from his official residence in Delhi last year, resigned in April.
The CJI said the apex court had recently considered the relationship between legitimate criticism and public confidence in the institution.
“In our order, we reiterated that ‘the Judiciary, as an institution, is not, and cannot be, averse to criticism’, as ‘fair, informed and constructive critique of judicial functioning’ is ‘a legitimate and necessary feature of a vibrant constitutional democracy’, contributing to institutional accountability and self-correction,” he said.
The CJI said this lay at the heart of transparency itself, “for a court cannot seek the confidence of the public by placing itself beyond scrutiny; it must remain willing to be examined, questioned and, where necessary, criticised”.
Transparency for a court, he said, is not simply a matter of open doors and public hearings, though it certainly includes those things.
“It means that the reasoning behind a decision, and not merely its result, can be examined by anyone who cares to look, including the very people the decision goes against. A court that announces its verdicts but keeps its reasoning to itself has not really been transparent, whatever else it may have done,” the CJI said.
He said public trust was not the same as public approval and the difference mattered a great deal.
“A court does not earn trust by being liked, or by handing out the outcomes people wanted,” he said, adding, “It earns trust when the people who lost, who wanted an entirely different result, still walk away believing that the process which decided against them was a fair one”.
The CJI said access to justice does not simply mean that a court exists somewhere in a district.
“Courts have often felt distant, in the literal sense, and procedures have often been complicated in ways that subtly favoured those who could afford lawyers who understood them.
“That is not the most comfortable thing to admit from a podium like this one. But it is true, and admitting it honestly is the only real starting point for talking about what is now changing,” he said.
He said over the last few years, under the e-Courts project, some of that distance has begun to close. The CJI said the promise of access means little without timely justice behind it.
“Taken together, that is what transparency in practice actually requires. Not one reform, but a continuing effort on two fronts: (i) making the system easier to reach; and (ii) making sure that once reached, it does not leave people waiting without an answer,” he said.
The CJI said public trust is the “only currency that authority is ever paid in, the only coin the judiciary has ever truly held”.
He referred to senior advocate Ram Jethmalani’s contribution to Indian jurisprudence, and said he was a “titan whose life was synonymous with the law”.