The Law Minsiter, Kiren Rijiju with his recent remarks has ignited a keen dicussion among the legal circles pertaining to the Collegium System and its alleged loopholes. He has even advocated, unequivocally for complete transfer of job of appointment of Judges to the Governement Executive.
"Till 1993, every judge in India was appointed by the law ministry in consultation with the Chief Justice of India. We had very eminent judges at that time," Rijiju said in response to a question on the process of appointment of judges.
"The Constitution is clear about it. It says that the President of India will appoint judges, that means the law ministry will appoint judges in consultation with the Chief Justice of India," he said.
"The Supreme Court in 1993 defined consultation as concurrence. In no other field has consultation been defined as concurrence but in judicial appointments," he said, adding that the collegium system was expanded by the judiciary in 1998.
He listed three points in his denouncement of the Collegium System.
"I am aware that the people of the country are not happy with the collegium system of appointment of judges. If we go by the spirit of the Constitution, appointing judges is the job of the government," he said.
"Second thing, nowhere in the world except India is there a practice that judges appoint their brothers as judges", he added.
"Third, as the law minister, I have observed that half of the time and minds of judges are preoccupied with deciding who will be the next judge. Their primary work is to give justice, which suffers due to this practice," he blew out his final criticism.
Notably, his assessment has not gone unnoticed as the newly appointed Chief Justice of India, DY Chandrachud in what is assumed to be a retort has backed the Collegium System as 'independent and fair'.
While conceding that the system may need some transparency for its transformation to meet expectations of today's time and age, he said no constitutional institution or model is perfect.
"We need to strengthen the collegium system by ironing out the creases and by being responsive to criticism. Dealing with such issues requires constitutional statesmanship and not public grandstanding", he said.
Seems now, former Judges of the Supreme Court do share the same opinion as in a recent panel dicusssion on a National News Channel, Justice Madan Lokure and Justice Deepak Gupta showed their disapproval of the Law Minister's prosposal.
Justice Lokur who seemed strongly convinced that the Government shall soon take action on the Collegium System, suggested that the Supreme Court should act the changes before that.
The Supreme Court collegium must have changes, they need to discuss it and they need to discuss it threadbare. And this, I think, is the right moment to do it before the government launches an attack on the collegium and tries to displace it completely", he said.
He said that the comments made by the Law Minister were totally uncalled for and infact it is the government which is creating all kinds of problems and then went on to examplify the same.
Justice Deepak Gupta too expressed discontentment with the Collegium system but didn't favour Government takeover as well.
"I don't think the collegium system is working very well, to that extent I sort of tend to agree with the law minister, that there needs to be an improvement. But do you have a better system? I don't think so. The way this government functions, if the government totally comes in control of the appointments, we are heading for disaster. So the collegium system is the best we can have but it needs improvement", he said.
Justice Madan Lokur agreed with his collegue in his stand and mentioned that he had consistently maintained that the Collegium System needs to do away with the inconsistencies and shortcomings. He said that its high time to bring changes and try to must have 'objective criteria' for selecting judges so that fingers are not raised.
Noting that fingers are not pointed when you select the best person, he added:
"Finding out if there is some person who is better than the best, who has been overlooked and if so, why- these are issues that the collegium must consider. It is alright for the collegium to say that 'well, we selected the best persons'. Yes, you selected the best, but there are some who are better than the best and why have they not been selected. It may not be a good idea to disclose those reasons but certainly consider those persons also. If you can't select them now, because of seniority or whatever, then perhaps maybe a little later. If you are going to start appointing persons who are low down in the seniority and overlook much better judges higher up in the seniority, so clearly people will ask questions."
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(With input from news agency language)
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