The Freethought Party of India (FPI) has sent its proposals to the Registrar of the Supreme Court of India on strengthening the Collegium System so as to appoint judges of honesty, integrity, unrighteousness and excellent legal calibre.
The party has opposed any representation of any community in the higher judiciary on the basis of gender, caste, religion, language or region. The Supreme Court or any High Court should not be treated as a replica of any State Assembly or the lok Sabha of the Indian Parliament. Since primacy of judiciary and limited role of the executive in appointment of judges is a part of the basic structure of the Constitution and the primacy of judiciary in initiating a proposal and finalizing the same, the Chief Justice of India has to have the last word in the matter, it said.
It is the secretariat of the Collegium System that has to select the most highly competent lawyers of integrity and of legal knowledge and in order to do so it must make it binding for lawyers practicing before the courts of higher judiciary that each such lawyer should maintain utmost transparency while receiving the case and fees for the same from the client and this must be entered into the Clients’
Register of the concerned lawyer and the client should be given a cash receipt against the money that he/she pays to the lawyer and the concerned lawyer should take a reasonable time of a week or two to file the case in the appropriate court, it said, adding that a lawyer should not harass or cheat the client in any way and he should not keep the case uninitiated for months together on some plea or the other. Moreover, each lawyer should be required to put the case received immediately in his website. Thus, the case must come to the public domain. The case after being filed should not lie in the court unopened or unheard for months together. The court must have a schedule in accordance with which the case filed will be heard and accordingly disposed of.
No lawyer should take the case and keep it pending at his chamber and go on acting unethically under the pressure from the opposite party. If such is the nature of a lawyer, then he/she should be blacklisted and penalised and should never be considered for any judicial appointment.
The FPI said after the delivery of the judgment, concerned authorities should implement, within a month’s time, the judgment delivered by the court.
The secretariat of the Collegium System must have the mechanism armed with sufficient powers to see the faithful implementation of the judgments delivered by the High Courts and the Supreme Court, the FPI emphasised.
The proposal to appoint someone as the Judge of the High Court or Supreme Court be initiated by the Collegium System and be cleared by it but it must be finally examined by the Rajya Sabha (Council of States) on the model of what the Judicial Committee of the Senate of the Congress of the USA does. The Rajya Sabha is no longer under the thumb of the Union Government led by the Prime Minister of India, it said.