Justice J. S. Verma's call for legal enforcement of judicial accountability in his interview to this newspaper should be taken up with the utmost seriousness and urgency. Within days of retiring as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Justice Verma has chosen to speak out about corruption in the judiciary and the failure of existing mechanisms to establish norms of conduct or bring errant judges to book. Among those failed mechanisms are two instituted when he presided over the court. Such forthrightness underlines the severity of the problem and the urgent need for remedies. "If in a court of 20, there are two judges whose integrity for good reason is doubtful", he says, "I think it is a very serious threat" (to the judicial system). His words cannot be taken lightly. All the weight of the office he has just stepped down from lies behind them. Justice Verma is not content to shake his head sorrowfully at the decline in judicial standards. He must be thanked for making no bones about the damage corruption in
the judiciary is doing to the system.For far too long senior judges have tended to deny that corruption was a serious issue and to regard cases which came to light as aberrations. Denial has delayed putting appropriate remedies in place. When some of the harshest critics of judicial conduct hesitate to look beyond the judiciary for solutions, it is instructive to hear Justice Verma dismiss tradition, convention and peer pressure as unworkable. Clearly the times have changed and changed for the worse. The country has seen the collapse of values and unwritten codes of conduct which governed many institutions over the last 50 years. It should be no surprise to see a similar breakdown in sections of the judiciary whose members are products of the same changing society. Oaths of office are no longer enough, accountability must be enforced by law. This comes close to implying that integrity does not come, as a matter of course, with a job on the bench.
Justice Verma finds fault with the impeachment process --
the only one available under the Constitution -- which proved vulnerable to political interference in the single instance when it was utilised against former Justice Ramaswami. The present procedure of investigation of misconduct by a committee of judges has evolved after several conferences of judges of the Supreme Court and High Courts studied the issue. The weakness of the procedure is that its verdict cannot be enforced: an indicted judge can simply refuse to resign. This must be overcome, Justice Verma says, by legally empowering the Chief Justice of India to remove a judge indicted by the judicial committee. Presumably, an appeal to a separate body of judges will be heard before the CJ acts. It is a sign of how standards have declined. Only the threat of dismissal can, apparently, improve conduct. If that is so, so be it. There is no better way than for judges to judge the conduct of one another. But checks and balances in such closed, internal processes are essential. Pending reforms in the process of
appointing judges need attention. The 12th Lok Sabha must give judicial reform priority and encourage informed debate.
Copyright © 1998 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
