Karnataka high court and Supreme Court advocate KV Dhananjay has commissioned a web developer to build a website that is intended to allow advocates to rate judges on three parameters - knowledge, integrity and cordiality.
Dhananjay, whose recent research that only 7 per cent of Supreme Court cases concerned constitutional issues found resonance in February in even the apex court bench, said that the site would start by allowing rating of Karnataka high court judges and expand to include other courts soon.
Legally India has interviewed Dhananjay about the project.
Why do you want to set up a website to let advocates publicly rate judges?
It is important that judges should get to see for themselves, the public perception that they carry. We do not have any such avenue at the moment in India.
Judges are human beings just like everybody else and a reliable feedback from lawyers could let them improve themselves. Take the Karnataka high court. It has some of the finest judges in India or may be, even in the world.
At the same time, there are bad apples too. The fact that there are good or even exemplary judges insulates bad judges from public criticism and the net result is that bad judges have no incentive to improve.
Is this going to be limited to rating judges of the Karnataka high court only?
Not at all.
The Karnataka high court is merely the beginning and very soon, it should feature the judges of the Supreme Court as well.
This much said, I don’t think there is any real ground to exclude judges of different high courts in this country from such a public mirror.
So, in a short time, we should be able to get on one website, advocates to rate any judge of any High Court or the Supreme Court in this country.
What would be the criteria for rating a judge?
Well, this is going to be a learning curve. To begin with advocates would rate judges on three criteria:
- ‘Knowledge of law and depth of understanding’
- ‘Honesty and integrity’
- ‘Cordiality and professionalism’
The scale would run from 0 to 10. A score of 0 would mean the least quality.
So, a score of 0 on ‘honesty and integrity’ would mean that the judge is terribly corrupt?
Obviously. A score of 0 on that scale would mean that the rater thinks that the judge in question is exceedingly corrupt.
What about fake ratings?
We already live in a world of social networks and it is too late in the day to worry about electronic impersonation.
How does this rating system work? Are advocates going to register or there will be some kind of scrutiny to only let advocates to come in?
It would be nearly impossible, as things stand, to ensure that advocates alone are allowed to rate.
While we would request advocates alone to use our rating system, the current state of technology or surveillance cannot ensure that our intention of allowing advocates only to rate is fully honoured.
So, it is entirely possible that a few impersonators could abuse this rating system. However, robust surveillance systems would minimise such a possibility of abuse. We will not be storing personal information with us and that way, the person rating any judge would be assured that it is anonymous and safe for him to speak his mind.
What about contempt? Does this constitute contempt? Will you be slapped with contempt for this?
Well, I do know the law.
I have carefully read the law of contempt and nothing that I propose to do and nothing of the planned outcome would constitute contempt of any court.
That is fine and could merely be your perception. A court of law may hold otherwise!
Granted. The law is not merely what we honestly take it to be.
A court of law has the final say in determining whether an act constitutes a contempt of court and I do not rule out the possibility that a court might construe all of this as contempt and seek to punish me.
You see, law, like everything else in life, must rest on personal conviction and I am glad to tell you publicly today that I do hold a personal conviction that I do not breach any law by what I intend to do and I am willing to face the full legal consequences of my forthcoming act.
That means, you are willing to be jailed?
Of course.
I am deeply influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s saying that it is not the prison that is a problem but the cause for imprisonment. I would surely invite imprisonment if that is the price I should pay to follow my own moral and intellectual conviction in service of public good. Six months of jail is not a deterrent for me to follow my own conviction. I will gladly and willingly suffer it.
Jail is not a deterrent?
Yes.
I am not a coward.
Period.
Is this a commercial venture or a charitable case?
It is purely a charitable act and there will be no profit of any kind.
What is the timeline for all of this?
Two or three weeks from today to feature Karnataka high court judges and within a month of it, we should have all the judges of the Supreme Court.
A short time of two or three months after that should witness every other high court judges put on the rating scale.
Will there be a comment section or it will merely be a rating scale?
At this point of time, I do not see it desirable to introduce a comment section.
Does it not carry the risk that the public may lose faith in the judiciary if many of them are rated negatively?
First and foremost, the issue will be that of judicial credibility.
Should the website earn the trust of the legal fraternity and show judges in the actual light that they are in, the consequences flowing from the public getting to know how judges are viewed by the advocates are not for me to be too worried about.
Who is anybody to tell me that my creative energy is not welcome if its use would expose the truth for what it is? Further, there is a different way to look at it.
Consider the case of a judge who would score highly on all three parameters and nobody can rule out the possibility of a good number of judges scoring exceedingly well on all three parameters; should not the good thing in such judges be publicly acknowledged?
Please elaborate…
Say you are an advocate and you think that you know the law very well and that a particular judge who disagreed with you is lacking in knowledge of the law.
What if you tune into this and you find that the judge in question is in fact, drawing very high scores on the knowledge front?
That should make you reassess your own learning or your perception about the judge or both.
That way, you will get more grounded and you will more reliably learn from your peers’ perception.
So, should judges be pleased with your site?
Well, yes and no.
The good ones will be pleased with it and the bad ones will obviously be unhappy with it.
I would consider this effort to have paid off well when it motivates the bad judges to improve themselves and to narrow the gap between them and the average or good judges.
So, good judges simply have no reason to fear?
You are right.
I would not like to see this effort lead to any person unfairly rate any judge.
Moreover, going forward, if this site turns out to be unreliable or prone to manipulation, it surely should be ignored.
By the way, I am a strong critic of poor judicial salaries. Take a look at our judicial salaries. They are akin to minimum wages.
I would have requested the Collegium to raise judicial salaries if only they were open to that idea.
If you own a bicycle but insure it to a sum befitting a Mercedes Benz, an economist would readily see a mismatch.
Today, the size of our economy is close to 2 trillion Dollars and yet, what are we spending on judicial salaries vis-à-vis our defence?
Rs 5 lakhs per month for a trial judge, Rs 10 lakhs per month for a High Court judge and Rs 15 lakhs per month for a Supreme Court judge is the currently acceptable salary, in my view. And, I will someday soon fight to secure it.
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Ms. Trehan had faced a rough time after this.
anyways, any publicity is good publicity I guess.
One flaw though.
I don't like this one judge. So I gave him poor rating.
What is to differentiate poor marks on the basis of my personal bias vs actual corruption ?
As a corollary, a corrupt judge takes money and does my job, so I will rate him highly.
so my high rating would allow others to interpret the judge as honest?
Three reasons:(a) Truth is now a defence ; so, if he gives a mandatory option for the rater to affirm a declaration that he is telling the truth failing which the rater cannot reach the rating box (something like software contracts concluded on the net), he's protected. If I were him, I would make it mandatory for the rater to specify the judgment(s) that induced the rater to give that particular rating (b) The ratings are not his ; he is only responsible for establishing a medium, to be used responsibly by the raters, and then "rater going to sleep" himself. (c) for conviction, there has to be a substantial interference with the "due course of justice". Therefore, whether or not there has been a "substantial interference" with the "due" course of justice will require to be established "beyond all reasonable doubt" in the trial. See Section 13 of CoCA which says as follows , which says as follows :
"13. Contempts not punishable in certain cases.
Notwithstanding anything contained in any law for the time being in force, no court shall impose a sentence under this Act for a contempt of court unless it is satisfied that the contempt is of such a nature that it substantially interferes, or tends substantially to interfere with the due course of justice."
If anyone is planning to seek his prosecution for contempt, he would be well advised to first read thoroughly the Sanyal Committee report and the Lok/Rajya Sabha debates of 1969-1971 first (relating to the passage of CoCA, 1971).
I think it's high time we have a courts-adjusted avatar for the kindergarten story "The Emperor's New Clothes", coz I sure as hell want a shot at playing the little boy who tells kingie that he's sitting El Nudo !
So, kudos to Dhananjay !
I hope BCI supports him
Here is a very hard-hitting piece by a former bureaucrat about the oligarchy that India has become. In this he points out the role that the corrupt Indian higher judiciary is playing in propping up this oligarchy.
hillpost.in/2015/06/are-we-an-oligarchy-masquerading-as-a-democracy/103629/
He writes
" ... All the four pillars of a democratic dispensation – the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, the press – have developed deep fractures and have been taken over by termites and weevils who have hollowed out the innards of the edifice. They have been fattening themselves at our cost all these years; once in a while one of these insects tumbled out but we took little notice, and suspected no real danger. But now the Queen Bee itself is talking (or tweeting) and as the secrets tumble out the extent of the infestation is becoming clearer.
...
The judiciary too is not exempt from a few question marks, the biggest of them being: why is it so keen to retain its choke-hold on appointment of Judges ? In no other genuine democracy do judges appoint judges, but here we have a circus playing out on a daily basis in the Supreme Court where a perfectly reasonable NJAC Act is being scrutinised for its constitutionality, and in the interim all appointments have been put on hold – and that too when as many as 251 posts of judges are lying vacant and more than 40 million cases are pending in the courts. Why? Maybe the answer lies in the following statistics which a Mumbai lawyer M.J. Nedumpara recently submitted to the Supreme Court, based on information gleaned from the websites of the SC and 13 High Courts: 33% SC judges and 50% of High Court judges are ” related to higher echelons of the judiciary”, which translates to 6 in the former and 88 in the latter. This has been the result of the existing Collegium system of appointments (which the NJAC seeks to replace) in which vacancies are neither notified / advertised nor is there any transparency in the appointments. Further, a succession of judgements in the past has ensured that retired judges have almost complete monopoly over appointments to various Commissions and Tribunals, guaranteeing them post retirement sinecures. If this does not smell of an oligarchy or netocracy I am not sure what does.
...
These then are the four sub-oligarchies which coalesce into a grand whole which is the democratic republic of India. The four guard their turf zealously, both individually and collectively, and also network with each other to ensure that no harm befalls any of them. They do not allow any meaningful action to be taken against any of them and ensure that wrong-doing is never punished. The Radia tapes exposed the most venal complicity between politics, media and big business but were quickly erased. 2G and coal allocations were not a one-off mistake or malfeasance: they were part of a mutually beneficial public policy, and many more names than those charge-sheeted are involved, but the lid has been hastily lowered on the investigations. It is common knowledge where the SAHARA moneys came from and where they went, but our oligarchs are certainly not interested in the truth becoming public, so Subroto Roy remains in jail: he will pay the bail amount some day and walk free and everyone will breathe easier. Jayalalitha’s bail application is heard in record time while the victims of UPHAAR still wait for their application to be heard even after one year.
Convicted members of our privileged netocracy can get bail within hours while unconvicted undertrials rot in dungeons for years. A High Court judge passes a patently illegal order and threatens to register an FIR against his own Chief Justice; another defies the law by refusing to sentence a convicted rapist and instead ordering a “mediation” between the rapist and the victim (!!)- and both continue to serve in the courts, no doubt to pass similar illegal orders in the days to come. Five thousand poor farmers have committed suicide in the last one year under pressure to repay their loans, but one of our high flying (literally) multi-millionaires who owes more than Rupees seven billion to the banks continues to party in his private jets and Mediterranean villas and produce movies for his son. The country’s banking system is collapsing under the weight of Rs. 300,000 crores (US$ 50 billion) “non-performing assets” which is just a euphemism for loans taken by big business which they just refuse to return, with no consequences for them: of course, you and I have to pay for it by more expensive loans and lower returns on deposits. Official secrets are stolen from central ministries and the companies doing so identified (yes, they belong to our 1% club) but only class four employees and middle level managers arrested: the long arm of the law in India shrinks in direct proportion to the moneys and oligarchs involved. (I can guarantee that we will hear no more of this case). No less than four retired Supreme Court judges give (paid) legal opinions to help an absconding Lalit Modi, knowing fully well that his case is sub-judice and is likely to come up before the same court they were a part of till the other day. Can money speak any louder?
One can go on ad-nauseam but I think I have made the point intended-viz. that our oligarchs look after their own. In the first place laws and policies are made to suit them. If they still fall foul of them, then the laws are bent to breaking point. If even that doesn’t help then perverse legal interpretations are floated (such as drawing a distinction between an ” affidavit” and a ” disposition” and ” absconder” and ” evader” and so on.) And if, by some miracle, even that is of no avail then the final frontier stares us in the face: an impenetrable thicket of laws and lawyers, judges and judgments, adjournments and appeals that somehow ensures that the innocent is incarcerated and the guilty is freed.
..."
am not trying to belittle Mr. Dhananjay's efforts..he is a brave man and a lotta people would probably love to rate judges' but just wondering... wouldnt we say that most judges either already know or probably dont give a hoot about what lawyers think about them?
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