New Delhi: A retired Judge of the Delhi High Court and a former Law Commission member has called the All India Judicial Services an ‘impossible idea’, saying the concept has problems deeper than the local language barrier as being projected from various state and district courts of India.
This comes at a time when Chief Justice of India, TS Thakur, is preparing to meet chief justices of all the high courts to convince them to adopt the idea.
Speaking to News18, Justice (retd) Usha Mehra said that most of the criticism against the common exam for the services was how the local language will impact penning down judgments, but the problem could be graver leading to vitiating the entire process of justice mechanism.
“After such an exam, a judge belonging to Haryana may be deputed to a district court in Thanjavur, Tamil Nadu. Problem starts with appreciation of the witness statement. A native will never know English, and will speak in his own language, how the judge will cope with such a situation (sic),” Justice Mehra said.
The chief justices' conferences in 1961, 1963 and 1965 proposed the creation of an AIJS, but the proposal had to be shelved after some states and HCs opposed it. But this idea was again proposed before Justice PN Bhagwati in 1984.
“Justice Bhagwati had also allowed this idea to move ahead, but again the states and High Courts opposed this move, and it had to be dropped off,” Mehra said.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the golden jubilee celebrations of Delhi High Court mooted and revived the shelved plan and now the CJI plans to convince the high court chief justices to allow the exam to see the light of the day.
There have been oppositions also because many High Courts hold their exams on similar days, thereby depriving many from an opportunity to appear at multiple places, but the AIJS will seek to address this problem as well. But Justice Mehra believes this problem could even lead to an innocent be charged of a serious crime.
“The judges will start depending on the court masters for translations and if out of prejudice or any other issue, the translation is wrong; an accused can even be wrongly sentenced or charged. Is there any mechanism to address such a situation? The problem cannot be addressed with just an exam,” Mehra said. She headed the Justice Mehra commission while submitting its report in 2013 on the Nirbhaya gang rape case.
The government’s idea of creating AIJS derives validity from the constitutional amendment which was carried out in 1977 to Article 312 which provided for the creation of such a body. But Mehra told News18 that treating AIJS on par with IAS officers as in the article “was not possible”.
“IAS officers can always learn the language or adjust through secretaries, but judiciary has a deeper role to play which involves the appreciation of statements of witnesses by the judges, and this often determines what sentences to deliver,” she said.
She also said that the’ time lapse’ government was trying to address by bringing in this system would eventually backfire. “In Chennai, up to district judge level, it is compulsory to write a judgment in Tamil. Now one may argue that local languages itself should be scrapped from creating hindrances and English be uniformly applied, but judgments are not penned on its own, it involves appreciation of facts, circumstances and evidences, and all of them are mostly in the local language, terminologies or references. The time lapse we are trying to address with such an exam will prove futile, because here the pendency will further increase, with each case taking a lot of time to be decided,” she said.
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