The Supreme Court of India. (Express Photo by Tashi Tobgyal)
The Supreme Court on Thursday adopted a roster system for allocation of matters to judges, reported PTI. Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra’s decision was made public on the apex court’s website. The 13-page notification said a roster of the work for fresh cases notified under the order of the Chief Justice of India will come into effect from February 5.
The 13-page notification has given the description of matters that would be allocated to the benches headed by the CJI, justices Chelameswar, Gogoi, Lokur, Joseph, A K Sikri, S A Bobde, R K Agrawal, N V Ramana, Arun Mishra, A K Goel and R F Nariman. The names of these 12 judges are in the order of their seniority
The CJI has been asserting his rights as ‘master of roster’, but in a series of instances, the four other Supreme Court judges – Justices Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan B Lokur and Kurian Joseph – had pointed out in their letter written to him two and a half months ago, which they made public, the rostering of cases was such as to not inspire confidence in the system being fair, transparent or just. Also Read: No meeting held with CJI, judges propose roster reform panel
The four judges, who had raised concerns over the allocation of cases, are learnt to have proposed the setting up of a committee comprising judges who would be Chief Justices in the future to suggest an institutional mechanism for marking of cases as per the Roster that would be notified by the SC Registry. The SC Roster is not known to the public. Making it public has been one of the demands of the Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA) too.