In an interesting twist ito the sexual harassment charge against an MP High Court judge, the victim — a former additional District judge of Bhopal, has alleged that crucial evidence in the form of her communication with the High Court, her friends and well-wishers has gone missing from her e-mail account.
The former judicial officer brought this fact to the notice of the Supreme Court which is hearing her petition for an in-house enquiry against the judge who made sexual advances forcing her to ultimately resign. The Bench headed by Justice JS Khehar allowed her lawyer senior advocate Indira Jaising to file the application that will be taken up along with her matter on November 10.
The missing of emails came to light on October 31. On further search, the victim realised that the mails “deleted” from her account pertained to her communication with the MP High Court in a bid to destroy evidence supporting her charge of sexual harassment against the sitting HC judge. Suspecting that her account was “hacked” by creating a facsimile account from where all her mail are read, filtered, and permanently deleted, she lodged a complaint with the Delhi Police Cyber Crimes Cell on November 1.
Even the correspondence made with her lawyers, their opinions with regard to the case and her instructions to them from time to time have been monitored, the lady judge alleged.
“Such an activity of filtering, hacking and disclosure of their identity to hackers has a chilling effect on several valuable rights in a democratic society including free and fair expression, and access to justice; more so given that the private respondent is a sitting judge in the High Court,” the application said.
In her complaint to the police, she has hinted that the “hacker” created a rediffmail account and it was marked as the primary account by the said intruder by changing the settings of her yahoo mail account. According to her, “All mails were first going to the said account created by the hacker and also, since the hacker had complete access to the yahoo account, certain of the important emails were also deleted.”
With the Delhi Police probing the complaint of the former judicial officer, the application has sought a direction to the police to report on the status of investigation to Court and make best efforts to restore the deleted mails.