Four months after the Supreme Court held that High Courts should not entertain appeals against orders of the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT), the apex court is having second thoughts.
In a significant decision passed on Tuesday, a Bench of Justices Ranjan Gogoi and NV Ramana decided to reconsider its March 11, 2015 decision which required litigants aggrieved by the Tribunal’s orders to approach straight to the apex court. The March 11 order virtually blocked High Courts’ power to hear writ petitions against the Tribunal decisions.
The Bench felt the issue required consideration after it heard a petition by a hapless Army widow who indicated how the SC order left her remediless, resulting in the Punjab and Haryana High Court dismissing her petition on May 26 this year for enhanced compensation. Her husband died in an accident during operational duty on the Indo-China border.
The court issued notice to the Centre and decided to have a relook on the March 11 decision titled Union of India v Maj Gen Shri Kant Sharma. For the petitioners, senior advocate Arvind Datar and advocate Aishwarya Bhati submitted that post the SC order, no HC was willing to entertain any petition against AFT order.
Moreover, under Section 31 of the AFT Act 2007, appeal to the Supreme Court is only maintainable where there is a “point of law of general public importance” certified by the Tribunal and not as a regular course. This resulted in a helpless situation for thousands of disabled soldiers, ex-servicemen and Army widows.
Since issues such as pay, pension, promotion, etc, are matters personal to the litigants that do not involve “point of law of general public importance”, the petitioners felt that the SC order required to be revisited as it blocked the right of appeal to litigants, majority of whom were soldiers of lower ranks, disabled soldiers and military widows.