A month into the summer vacation, history is being created in the Supreme Court with more than half of the judges having attended the court so far. The SC has a working strength of 28 judges, and a total of 16 apex court judges have sat for various durations during the vacation until now. This number is expected to touch 22 by the time the vacation ends on July 2. Never before in the past have so many judges held sitting during the vacation.
The decision to take this unprecedented step has come from the Chief Justice of India who has constituted 10 Benches with two judges each for hearing of urgent and old matters during vacations.
“Under Rule 6 of Order II of the Supreme Court Rules 2013, the Chief Justice of India has nominated the following Division Benches for hearing of urgent miscellaneous matters and regular matters during the summer vacation for the period from May 11 to May 27, May 28 to June 14 and June 15 to July 2,” said a notification issued by the Supreme Court registry on May 3.
Dividing the entire vacation period into three parts, a total of 12 judges have been assigned duties by the CJI to hear regular and urgent matters throughout the vacation, In addition, two Constitution Benches with five judges each held sittings in the first part of vacations, taking the total number of judges working during the vacation to 22.
The constitution Bench on triple talaq headed by CJI JS Khehar sat from May 11 to May 18 for six working days. Besides him, the Bench had the presence of Justices Kurian Joseph, RF Nariman, UU lalit and S Abdul Nazeer. The other Constitution Bench presided by Justice Dipak Misra conducted a short sitting of two days (May 15-16) to decide the maintainability of a petition which questioned the policy of WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook on grounds of invasion of privacy rights of citizens. Besides Justice Misra, the other judges who heard the case include Justices AK Sikri, Amitava Roy, AM Khanwilkar, and MM Shantanagouder.
In the first part of vacation (May 11 to May 27), some judges even sat in a different combination to hear specially listed matters pertaining to medical admissions, validity of Shiksha Mitras by the Uttar Pradesh Government, and a PIl challenging the decision of the Government to make Aadhaar mandatory to a slew of public welfare schemes.
In the second part of the vacation (May 28 to June 14), a total of five Vacation benches with six judges will take turns to sit in various combinations for periods ranging for even a single day, to up to a maximum period of five days. This has been devised for the first time as in the previous years, one Division Bench used to be designated as Vacation Bench for one or two weeks in a row.
For the last part of vacation, four judges will sit in different combinations to hold court and are expected to sit for durations extending to a week.