Collegium needs to self-audit how it has worked: Prasad
India’s law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that now that the collegium system for appointing judges to the higher judiciary has been around for almost 25 years, maybe it is time for an audit – done by the collegium itself – on how it has worked.
It is not his job to do the audit, Prasad added in an interview. “We respect the independence of the judiciary.”
The government and the Supreme Court have been locked in a battle over judicial appointments. The National Democratic Alliance government sought to pass a law on judicial appointments to create the National Judicial Appointments Commission. But despite having bipartisan support, as Prasad points out, this was scrapped by the Supreme Court in late 2015.
The Supreme Court then asked the government to come up with a Memorandum of Proceeding or MoP, on judicial appointments, a move seen as widely acknowledg-
NEW DELHI:
ing the need to improve the process by which judges to the higher judiciaryareappointed.TheMoP is stuck with the Supreme Court since mid-2017. Prasad says his ministry has suggested the need for a screening mechanism for judicial appointments instead of an opaque process. His ministry would not just accept recommendations from the collegiums with no reasoning or selection criteria mentioned, he seemed to suggest: “This ministry is not a post office.”
Despite having serious “reservations” on the NJAC judgment, the government is hoping to work with the court to create a transparent MoP, Prasad said.