The Supreme Court collegium, highly criticised for its opaque decision-making process, has taken a big leap towards reform of the judicial appointments process by resolving to put out all its decisions on the apex court website beginning this week.
The resolution adopted at the collegium meeting on October 3 was unanimously passed by the five-judge collegium headed by Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and comprising Justices J Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B lokur and Kurien Joseph.
In future, all decisions on appointment and transfer of High Court judges, appointment of Chief Justices of High Courts, and Supreme Court judges will be made available to the general public under a separate head “Collegium Resolutions” displayed on the apex court website www.sci.gov.in. However, the deliberations made in the collegium will not be shared with the public.
The decision of the collegium was well received by the lawyers who saw the move as a step towards introducing confidence and transparency in the collegium. A statement issued by Campaign for Judicial Accountability and Reforms (CJAR) said, “the collegium functioning needs to become more transparent and accountable to the public at large. This is a first but necessary step towards achieving both objectives and will go some distance in restoring the public confidence in the system, cutting at the roots of nepotistic and arbitrary judicial appointments.”
The system of judges-appointing-judges has remained in controversy ever since its introduction by way of a judicial decision in the year 1993. The secretive manner in which the collegium met and took decisions made it unpopular. This led Parliament and State Governments to introduce a Constitutional amendment to replace the collegium system with the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC). A separate Act was enacted by Parliament called the NJAC Act creating a six-member NJAC having three judicial members, law Minister and two eminent persons to be appointed by a Committee comprising CJI, Prime Minister and leader of Opposition in the lok Sabha.
However, both the NJAC Act and the Constitutional Amendment was challenged in the Supreme Court which struck down both the laws as unconstitutional in October 2015 and revived the collegium system. It was a majority verdict by four out of five judges but some of the judges who formed the majority view did accept that the collegium failed to inspire confidence in judicial appointments and needed reforms.
The five-judge Bench that delivered the verdict later sat on to decide what reforms are required in the collegium and passed another set of order giving Government a free hand to reform the existing process by altering the Memorandum of Procedure governing the collegium’s functioning. Even as the Centre revised MoP in order to introduce transparency and make judiciary accountable, the draft MoP is yet to be finalised. Appointments to SC and HCs have continued under the collegium system that remains to be reformed till date.