Team News Riveting
Patna, June 13
Mrs Chhaya Mishra, a well-known woman lawyer of Bihar on Sunday regretted the suggestion made by Supreme Court Bar Association president to Chief Justice of India to get lawyers practising in Supreme Court as judges in different High courts in the country.
In a communication to the Bar Council of India and Bihar State Bar Council, Mrs Chhaya MIshra, a former joint Secretary of Advocates Association said the move amounted to insulting, humiliating and underestimating the merits of lawyers in the states. She sought immediate intervention of the Bar Councils to ensure the move was frustrated at the earliest.
She recalled the recent observations of the chief justice of India, N V Ramanna who recommended to the Chief Justices of the High Courts to ensure social diversity in appointments in higher judiciary while forwarding recommendations for the appointment of Judges. There has been imbalanced representation in terms of gender, caste, religion etc so far, the issue of professional diversity in higher judiciary which has become a monopoly of lawyer judges has escaped serious scrutiny.
Mrs Chhaya Mishra said the provisions of the Constitution under article 217(1) and 224 should be followed while appointing judges in High Courts. A new memorandum of procedure which laid down the procedure for appointment of judges in High Courts was to be made in 2015 on the orders of the Supreme Court. However, the Apex Court’s order is yet to be implemented. The MOP was first drafted in June 1999 and it laid procedure for appointment of Judges. Later, in 2015, Parliament enacted the National Judicial Appointments Commission Act to make a significant departure in the procedure for appointment of High Court Judges. It provides for replacement of the Collegium system too.
If the suggestion of the Supreme Court Bar Association made on June 8,2021 is accepted, there is enough ground of apprehension that the meritorious lawyers in High Courts would be deprived of their chances to be elevated to the Bench and nominees of the VVIPs, in government, political parties, legal fraternity would be given preference over the Vernacular lawyers in High Courts. She feared the lawyers in the High Courts of smaller and till recently backward states like Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Uttarakhand would be the worst hit.
This Colonial mindset must be discouraged at the outset and allow the meritorious and deserving lawyers in State Bars to become Judges in the courts where they had practiced. She requested the Chief Minister, Nitish Kumar also to take up the issue with the Chief Justice of Patna High Court and ensure ” apartheid” proposed by the SC Bar Association president was nipped in the bud.
