New Delhi, Feb. 23: President Pratibha Patil today urged the judiciary to address the problem of delays plaguing its delivery system and warned against the “ominous portents” of letting things slide further.
“Case disposals are excruciatingly time consuming. This agonising delay has rendered the common man’s knock on the doors of justice a frustrating experience. This has ominous portents. We cannot allow a situation where the common man is tempted to take law into his own hands and subscribe to the deviant culture of the lynch mob,” she said.
Patil was addressing an inaugural event at the All India Seminar on Judicial Reforms organised by the Confederation of Indian Bar. It was attended by Chief Justice K.G. Balakrishnan, law minister H.R. Bhardwaj, the attorney-general and the solicitor-general among others.
“The formal adjudicatory machinery has to reign supreme,” Patil said. She also said judges were overworked and the system needed to be made easy and accessible.
The chief justice tried to allay the impression that it took years to get relief from courts. “This impression... is not fully correct,” he said. Of the total number of cases pending in courts, only 40 per cent are less than a year old, Balakrishnan said.
He blamed poor governance and lack of administrative reform for the large number of cases coming to courts.
No comments:
Post a Comment