HCs yet to comply with SC's timeline on reserved verdicts

New Delhi: Supreme Court may have fixed timeline for the President and the governors for taking a decision on bills passed by state assemblies, but has not been able over nearly 24 years to get high courts to comply with its 2001 judgment laying guidelines on speedier pronouncement of verdicts reserved in cases.

In 2001, SC in Anil Rai case noticed the troubling practice among HC judges reserving verdicts only to forget to pronounce judgments or pronounce only operating portions of the verdict with a promise to provide detailed reasons later, which in some cases went abegging.

To eradicate the anomaly of keeping judgments reserved for months and in some cases years, SC laid down five-point guidelines that mandated the chief justices of HCs to remind the judges if they had not pronounced decisions within two months of reserving the verdict. SC also allowed the litigants to apply for early pronouncement of a judgment, if it was not delivered within three months of reserving it.

The non-implementation of the guidelines was noticed on Monday by a bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and Prashant Kumar Mishra, who were shocked to discover that an Allahabad HC bench has not delivered judgment for almost a year.

Justice Mishra said, "In most of HCs, there is no mechanism where the litigant can approach the concerned bench or the chief justice bringing to its notice the delay in delivery of judgment. In such a situation, the litigant loses his faith in the judicial process defeating the ends of justice."

While reiterating the guidelines for expeditious pronouncement of judgment by HCs as laid down in 2001, the bench said, "If the judgment is not delivered within three months, Registrar General shall place the matters before the CJ for orders and the CJ shall bring it to the notice of the concerned bench for pronouncing the order within two weeks thereafter, failing which the matter be assigned to another bench."

Significantly, the problem is not restricted to HCs. SC has been unable to find the cure for the same problem within its own houses, with too many instances of judgments having been reserved for months. Justice A S Oka delivered the judgment on a long pending dispute between two factions of ISKCON after keeping it reserved for almost a year.


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