NEW DELHI: Sitting judges have faced removal procedures in the past but no judge has so far been removed despite serious charges of misconduct or corruption as the process could not reach the conclusive stage for one or the other procedural reason.
The Constitution provides that a judge can be removed only by an order of the President, based on a motion passed by both the
Lok Sabha and the
Rajya Sabha by a majority of the total membership of the House and also the majority of at least two-thirds of the members of that House present and voting.
Justice V Ramaswami, a judge of the Supreme Court, was the first judge in independent India against whom removal proceedings were initiated in 1991. He was charged with spending extravagantly on his official residence during his tenureas chief justice of Punjab and Haryana High Court in 1990. Even the
Supreme Court Bar Association had passed a resolution calling for his removal.
The then CJI Sabyasachi Mukherjee announced in open court that he had advised Ramaswami to “desist from discharging judicial functions so long as the investigations continued”. Analysis of past cases shows that while one removal motion (Justice V Ramaswami) failed to secure the required two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha, another one (Justice Soumitra Sen of the
Calcutta High Court) did not reach the lower House after the motion was passed by Rajya Sabha as the judge resigned.
The resignation spared Justice Sen from being the first judge to be removal. He had faced charges of misappropriating Rs 33.23 lakh as a court-appointed receiver in the capacity as a lawyer, and even misrepresenting facts before a Calcutta court in a 1983 case. In the case of another judge, Justice P D Dinakaran, the then chief justice of Sikkim HC, the matter was dropped in 2011 as he resigned before removal proceedings were initiated in Rajya Sabha.
