NEW DELHI: For the first time in nearly three decades of its existence, the Supreme Court collegium met with candidates recommended for judgeship by the collegiums of the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana high courts last weekend in Visakhapatnam to assess their personality, suitability, and competence for constitutional court judgeship.
Since the creation of the collegium system by two judgments of the SC in the 1990s for selection of constitutional court judges and insulate judiciary from influence of the executive, this is the first time the SC collegium, led by CJI Sanjiv Khanna and comprising Justices B R Gavai and Surya Kant, carried out a part of the judge election process outside Delhi.
More than 20 of the 32 SC judges went with their families for a retreat at Visakhapatnam, a busy east-coast city in Andhra Pradesh. With the Andhra Pradesh and Telangana HCs recommending candidates each for HC judgeship, the collegium decided that instead of calling the candidates to Delhi for interaction, it would be better to assess them at Visakhapatnam which will save the candidates both time and money.
The interaction with three candidates from Andhra Pradesh and five from Telangana took place in the hotel where the SC judges were lodged for retreat. The collegium had kicked in the novelty of personal interaction with candidates on Dec 22 when it assessed the suitability, capability and personality of candidates recommended for judgeship in the Allahabad, Bombay and Rajasthan HCs.
Earlier, the SC collegium solely went by the detailed biodata of the lawyers and judicial officers submitted by HC collegiums as well as the intelligence reports about their antecedents and opinions of the concerned governors and chief ministers. The personal interaction with the recommended candidates helped in judging first-hand their demeanour and suitability for appointment as judges, sources said.
The collegium is at present debating on two significant proposals to weed out the ‘father-uncle judge’ influence in the selection of judges to HCs. Given the widespread discontent among lawyers that first generation lawyers seldom get considered for HC judgeship when pitted against sitting or former constitutional court judges’ lawyer children, the initial proposal was rather radical – pause selecting kith and kin of sitting and former judges’ children as HC judges.
Though many lawyers welcomed the proposal, some felt it would be discriminatory to bar appointment of competent lawyers as HC judges solely because they are children of sitting or former judges. The second proposal took a middle path and said the assessment benchmark for kith and kin of sitting or former judges’ lawyer children should be kept higher compared to that for first generation lawyers.
