Collegium meets candidates for HC judge posts
NEW DELHI: Seeking to improve the process of selecting the judges of the high court, the Supreme Court collegium this week informally interviewed lawyers whose names had been cleared for appointment to make sure they were right for the job.
Judges with knowledge of the meeting confirmed that the candidates had been called to the Supreme Court for an interaction with the top three judges who make up the collegiums, which is responsible for clearing appointments of judges to the high courts.
“This is the first time every lawyer whose name has been cleared for high court judgeship was called for an informal chat with the collegium. The idea was to get an overview of the person, assess his personality and see if the person is conversant in the language,” one judge said.
The prospective high court judges — five from West Bengal and another five from Madhya Pradesh — were called to the Supreme Court on March 26 for the interaction, aimed at assessing the merit and suitability of the candidates for the job.
Potential judges are recommended to the SC collegium by the states to which they belong. The collegium, which presently consists of chief justice Dipak Misra, justice J. Chelameswar and justice Ranjan Gogoi, also scrutinises the state chief minister’s views on the candidates, forwarded by the governor. They also receive Intelligence reports and observations by the department of justice.
After the informal interaction with the advocates, the SC collegium recommended the appointment of Biswajit Basu, . Amrita Sinha, Sutanu Kumar Patra, Abhijit Gangopadhyay, and Jay Sengupta as judges of the Cal- cutta high court. It suggested the appointment of Sanjay Dwivedi, Akhil Kumar Shrivastava, Brij Kishore Shrivastava, Rajendra Kumar Shrivastava, and Mohd. Fahim Anwar to the Madhya Pradesh high court,
Senior advocate Jaideep Gupta said the collegium’s move to interact with candidates before appointments was a “a good and a welcome move.”
“This kind of an interaction provides the collegium an opportunity to know the persons who are being appointed as judges. Previously, in a majority of the cases the collegium had very little opportunity of knowing these persons,” Gupta added.
This development comes at a time when a memorandum of procedure (MOP) on the appointment of judges is pending.
On December 16, 2015, a constitution bench of the SC headed by justice JS Khehar, who retired as chief justice in August last year, directed the government to finalise a new MOP in consultation with the CJI to replace the current one and listed suggestions to improve the collegium system of appointment.
The new appointments will take the number of Calcutta high court judges to 35 against the total strength of 72. In the Madhya Pradesh high court, the number of judges will go up to 40, still short of a sanctioned strength of 53.