strike
Exclusive: Right to Information (RTI) activist and advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi filed a writ petition before the Delhi high court today, challenging the two-day nationwide lawyers’ strike called by the Bar Council of India (BCI) for 11 and 12 July 2012 to oppose the Higher Education and Research Bill 2011.
Mint column: Lawyers should be the noble and independent servants of justice, the courts and their clients. Finding lawyers who do all three of those things is the exception, rather than the rule.
For starters, Indian clients have very little, if any, recourse against lawyers who give them bad, negligent or harmful legal advice, as explained in today’s Mint feature. But that is just the tip of lawyers’ legal immunity iceberg.
Lawyers striking against lower court power transfer interrupts Delhi HC 2G hearing [ET]
Reliance tells CBI that Swan Telecom was not an associated company at the time of the licence issue [Hindu]
SC extends stay on “very polluting” Sterlite plant closure [Law et al]
561 out of 626 districts have constituted “Juvenile Justice Boards” [PIB]
Churchgate’s Mocha and others to challenge in SC Bombay HC upholding of ban on tobacco sales in eateries [DNA]
Most advocates in the country’s courts were on strike or protesting yesterday. Ostensibly the targets were the Legal Services Bill and the service tax. But one Twitter user did reasonably wonder whether the timing was not more than a convenient a coincidence, coinciding as it did with India’s nail-biting triumph against Australia in the Cricket World Cup.
Advocates at courts throughout India are today observing a protest day, wearing black ribbons in opposition to the Legal Services Bill, coinciding with a Delhi High Court Bar Association strike against the service tax.
Madras advocates have called for abstinence from court work today (10 December) to protest against the Legal Practitioner Bill 2010 citing the Advocate Act’s efficacy to deal with issues of client protection and regulation of the legal professions.
Chennai advocates demonstrated outside the Madras High Court yesterday, demanding a raising of the advocates’ welfare fund amount from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 5 lakh, reported the PTI, adding that the advocates also demanded for Tamil to be made an accepted court language in High Court proceedings. Earlier this year in June, Chennai lawyers went on a hunger strike to recognise Tamil as the court’s official language, according to the ANI. In an earlier Legally India column, advocate Elizabeth Seshadri argued against making languages other than English official court languages.
The strike of Rajasthan lawyers would end after judges in Rajasthan High Court said at midnight yesterday that the contentious judicial service exam would be scrapped, reported CNN-IBN this morning, citing the principal private secretary to the Chief Justice who said he had received notice in writing from the advocates that they would resume work tomorrow.
The judges’ last-minute decision would be a U-turn as only yesterday the High Court had issued notices on a petition to declare the strike illegal as the striking advocates themselves had threatened embarking on a mahapadaav (mass siege) of the Jaipur and Jodhpur high court benches from tomorrow (23 September), according to the Times of India.
The lawyers had been striking for almost a month now, having protested the exam for the post of additional district judge.
Advocates from Rajasthan High Court are protesting the most recent exam for the post of additional district judge, in which they allege non-lawyers have been selected. A number of lawyers in Jaipur and 29 colleagues from Jodhpur have announced an “indefinite strike” and kept work at the court suspended yesterday, according to the Times of India. The protesting advocates want the exam voided.
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The 2009-10 Union Budget received a frosty reaction from the business community this week: investors reacted by selling and lawyers reacted by doing what they do best: threatening to file law suits and, err, going on strike.
Lawyers have threatened legal action over the Government's new service tax as Delhi litigators are going on strike over the issue today.