MALHOTRA CLEARED AS SC JUDGE, GOVT SITS ON JOSEPH FILE
SELECTION SC collegium on Jan 10 cleared names of Justice Joseph and Indu Malhotra
The government cleared on Wednesday the appointment of senior advocate Indu Malhotra as a Supreme Court judge but kept on hold the top court collegium’s recommendation on elevating Uttarakhand high court Chief Justice KM Joseph, according to two people familiar with the matter.
NEW DELHI: The government cleared on Wednesday the appointment of senior advocate Indu Malhotra as a Supreme Court judge but kept on hold the top court collegium’s recommendation on elevating Uttarakhand high court Chief Justice KM Joseph, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The collegium — a body of the five top judges headed by the Chief Justice of India (CJI) that appoints SC judges — had on January 10 cleared the names of Justice Joseph and lawyer Malhotra.
While the government took up Malhotra’s case, it will spend more time to consider Justice Joseph’s file, one of the people quoted above said on condition of anonymity.
Malhotra — a renowned arbitration expert — was, in 2007, only the second woman to be appointed a senior advocate by the court, three decades after Leila Seth made history. She is the first woman to be nominated to the Supreme Court directly from the Bar.
Though “segregation” of recommendations (separate processing of names that have been sent by the collegium together) is rare in the Supreme Court, a government official defended the move, saying it was done “routinely” in the past in the case of high court judges’ appointments.
The norm of appointing candidates, whose names have been cleared together, at the same time ensures that their seniority is not compromised, explained a former Supreme Court judge who did not want to be named.
Judges who are appointed to the Supreme Court first are considered senior to those who are appointed later.
While Justice Joseph has been the chief justice of the Uttarakhand high court since July 2014, Malhotra was part of a committee headed by former SC judge Justice BN Srikrishna to advise on a revamp of India’s institutional arbitration apparatus.
Justice Joseph is the seniormost chief justice of a high court but in the all-India list of seniority, he figured at number 42 as on April 1, said one of the officials quoted above.
He added that the government may raise his seniority for taking longer to consider his name.
The last time the government had to segregate two recommendations made together, it led to a controversy.
The then Chief Justice of India RM Lodha had written a strongly worded letter to the law minister against it on June 30, 2014.
The current law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was in office then too. Justice Lodha had at that time said the move was made without his “knowledge and consent” and “unilaterally”.