The Bench and the Bar

The Jharkhand high court took notice of a Hindi daily newspaper’s report that ailing prisoners in the Rajendra Institue of Medical Sciences Ranchi (RIMS) were without drinking water.

The Delhi high court has elevated 12 lawyers to senior counsel.

The Odd-Even notification – the Delhi government’s 15-day rule restricting vehicles with even-numbered registration plates from plying on odd-numbered dates, and vice versa – is illegal, according to advocate Sachit Jolly’s petition challenging it.

Mumbai criminal lawyer Ashok Saraogi, who has represented gangster Abu Salem, was arrested on Sunday and sent to jail until 25 April for alleged cheating and forgery to help a client grab land, reported the Times of India.

Lawyers Sohel Kazi and I V Y Tauro, co-accused with Saraogi, will spend three days each in custody starting Monday.

Saraogi was currently representing Rahul Raj in the deceased television actress Pratyusha Bannerjee’s suicide case.

Saraogi was arrested after he withdrew an anticipatory bail application – his third to avoid arrest in the case where he is accused of helping businessman Ashish Bagaria and his father Santosh Kumar Bagaria usurp nine parcels of land belonging Ashish’s estranged wife Nickee in Raigad – in the Supreme Court.

In the ongoing hearing of petitions challenging the denial of right to worship to women devotees at the Sabarimala temple, Kerala, Justice Kurian Joseph, one of the three judges on the bench, on 18 April, asked amicus curiae Raju Ramachandran, a pointed question: Can you force deity who does not want to see women (of menstruating age), to 'see' women?

A special Mumbai court today issued a non-bailable arrest warrant against liquor baron Vijay Mallya, official sources said.

On 15 April, the Enforcement Directorate had moved the special court handling cases under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, seeking the warrant against Mallya who is currently outside India.

On at least three occasions, Mallya failed to honour ED summons for questioning in various cases pertaining to his loans of over Rs 9,000 crore and allegations of money laundering.

After he failed to appear in person on 18 March, 2 April and 9 April, he sought time till May to come to the ED, as he is abroad since 2 March.

The ED move came soon after the central government suspended Mallya’s diplomatic passport on 15 April.

The Centre on Monday told the Supreme Court that the East India Company did not take away the Kohinoor diamond but it was gifted to Britain by Sikh monarch Maharaja Ranjit Singh.

The government stand on the matter was conveyed to the apex court bench of Chief Justice TS Thakur and Justice UU Lalit in response to a public interest litigation by a non-governmental organisation, which was surprisingly not dismissed by the Supreme Court outright since writs of mandamus can not be issued against non-Indian public bodies.

The NGO, All India Human Rights and Social Justice Forum, has sought directions to the government to make efforts for getting the diamond back to India.

The court, while giving the government six more weeks, said that if it accepted the government position, all avenues for staking claim over the diamond will be shut.

The 108-carat diamond was presented to the then British monarch, Queen Victoria, in 1850 after the Anglo-Sikh wars, in which Britain gained control over the Sikh empire in the then undivided Punjab.

The Bar Council of India (BCI) has not satisfactorily complied with the Right to Information Act 2005 (RTI Act) provision which requires that it publish all its affairs on its website, held the Central Information Commission (CIC). The CIC said it is inclined to impose maximum penalty on the BCI if it doesn’t comply in a definite amount of time.

Maverick lawyer from Mumbai, Mathews J Nedumpara, had two of his writ petitions listed before two different benches at courts 3 and 4 on Wednesday, 13 April.

Item 9 before the bench of Supreme Court Justices JS Khehar and C Nagappan turned out to be an interesting hearing yesterday (13 April) when counsel for Tata Motors, Sidharth Luthra, persisted that there was a case of defamation against the Sunday Indian magazine, edited by the appellant IIPM-Supremo Arindam Chaudhuri, who has been no stranger to strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP) against publishers.

The Delhi lower judicial service (DJS) will now recruit 26 new judges, after the Supreme Court confirmed the result of 11 new candidates who cleared the DJS 2014 interview.

The Bombay high court today ordered that all IPL matches after 30 April should be shifted outside Maharashtra.

The matches scheduled until 30 April can, however, be held in the state, the court said, adding it could not afford to ignore the plight of people affected by drought.