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April 2010

Selection to SC should be more open : Delhi CJ

By Raman Jokhakar
Tarunkumar G. Singhal
Chartered Accountants
Reading Time 2 mins

New Page 3A. P. Shah, Chief Justice of
the Delhi High Court who was surprisingly bypassed for appointment to the
Supreme Court, has suggested that when a senior HC judge is not elevated to the
SC, the


reason should be recorded by the collegium and conveyed to him.

On a day when he publicly
admitted he couldn’t “pretend not to be hurt” on not making it to the SC, the
widely acclaimed judge told TOI, “The systemic problem in the collegium is lack
of transparency. There is too much secrecy. No reasons are recorded for
rejecting any one. The only way the collegium system can be improved is by
making it more
transparent.”

Justice Shah is the author
of two landmark verdicts (on decriminalisation of consensual homosexuality
between adults and applicability of Right to Information Act on the Chief
Justice of India). The SC collegium ignored him for elevation despite his being
one of the senior-most judges in the country. The decision has drawn a lot of
criticism, including from top jurists like Fali S. Nariman and former Chief 
Justice J. S. Verma who described him as “one of the finest judges in the
country.”

(Source : The Times of India, dated 12-2-2010)

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