Legal perspective

Legal perspective
Krishan Mahajan

JANUARY 4: The Supreme Court is a click aw-ay. It has its own website. Its daily business list and judgments are available on the Internet. And yet it is very far away from people. The reason is that all the three components of the apex court designed to benefit the people are sick. These three components are the enforcement of people-oriented judgments, the language of the court and legal aid.

The reason for the sickness is the complete absence of thinking about the role of law in the service of a billion and the place of legal regulation in the em-erging political economy of knowledge, information and infrastructure. No ma-tter how many new products are produced by the science of processing, under our Constitution the question will remain of the fairness of sharing.

The question therefore for the 21st century court is the fairness in the sharing of its judicial time in an era of instant access and instant availability. As a public resource institution, the apex court can turn its website into a sourceof instant access. It can do this if it courageously recognises that the skewed legal market today denies to the majority of citizens access to the court and to justice.

To widen the justice-access market, the Supreme Court needs to have a ph-ased plan by which people or lawyers on their behalf can file petitions by e-mail directly into the court. Encryption technology is available today to ensure responsibility and accountability. As of today the court is simply not ready for this and hence not ready for the service of the majority of the billion population that has not entered the economic market of livelihood.

The apex court can break the vicious circle of better access to it of those with more money and no access to it of those with little or no money by letting its existence be known to the latter. The majority of citizens in urban slums or the victims of development in villages today do not know about its existence or what it can do for them. Even if they kn-ew they would not have the money toaccess it. The money for access is available through publicly funded progra-mmes of legal aid run nationally by the apex court. But that also is not known to the very people who are in need of it and are entitled to it.

This begs of the apex court the establishment of the legal principle of the fundamental right to be informed and not merely the fundamental right to inform-ation. With such an interpretation of the fundamental right of speech and exp-ression under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution, every authority will be le-gally bound to develop the poor, will be equally legal bo-und to inform the poor of their rights and the means of getting that right. Without the fund-amental right of being informed, the national judici-al time resource of the apex court will continue to be used in violation of the directive principle that the country's resou-rces must be used for the common good.

Courts are social education centres and it depends on the judges whether they make them into centres of repute orotherwise. The technology and manpower for simultaneous translation of the English proceedings in the apex court is readily available. Citizens in the court can use headphones and switch on to the language they understand. Similarly, the entire government owned radio and TV network is available to the apex court for an effective operational legal information plan in local languages. Information technology (IT) today offers the apex court an unparalleled opportunity to get over the illiteracy barrier and make itself and the entire judicial machinery people-friendly institutions. But as of today there is not a whisper of such a plan.

The apex court has a choice. It can ensure a fair use of the national econo-mic resource called judicial time by empowering people with the information and the legal manpower to have access to this resource. Or it can passively allow the current pattern of use of judicial time that largely keeps out the majority of the poor, whose problems are related to community and developmentissues. If it persists in the latter course, it would amount to silently supporting the current legal business market full of illegal practices.

The signature turn of the next century is -- it's a click away. Rationally the right of sustainable development must be set to this tune. To the extent that the click is the end result of a process of thought and reflection, the new millennium is a test of the apex court's judicial will. As of today community judgments on environment and forests are the most violated ones since such judgments in the English language do not empower the local communities. Instead they simply enter the political economy of business lobbies. A legal but irrational economic sympathy for such communities of the billion is the millennium's call to the judges of the apex court. Will they open their hearts in response?