Lawyers can’t abuse court’s dignity: SC

NEW DELHI: Senior advocate Rajeev Dhavan must have used the words “unjust” and “unfair” for the Supreme Court a number of times during the last four years while representing the

Sahara

group, which has paid Rs 12,000 crore of the Rs 36,000 crore the court has recorded as due from it.

But the same words by Dhavan on Friday breached the court’s ‘threshold’ of tolerance and triggered an angry reaction from a bench headed by Chief Justice T S Thakur, which cancelled the interim bail of Subrata Roy and two directors. Later, when Sahara counsel Kapil Sibal and Narender Hooda apologised profusely for Dhavan’s “offending statement” and disowned it, the

CJI

said, “If anyone, be it a senior advocate, thinks he can abuse the court’s

dignity

, then he is mistaken. It is trend among some senior advocates these days to insult the court. The designation of senior advocate is an honour conferred by the court. It can also be taken away.”

When Sibal and Hooda kept apologising, the CJI said, “We do not enjoy saying all these things against any senior advocate. But the court’s dignity cannot be allowed to be tampered with. We have great tolerance but that too has a threshold. One can be known to be an eloquent scholar, but even he is not allowed to go on browbeating judges.”

In the evening, Dhavan reacted sharply to the CJI’s observations. “It is reported that Kapil Sibal apologised on his client’s behalf. Let me make it clear, I do not apologise for anything said in the court and reject the

apology

on my behalf,” he said in a written statement. “Judges cannot simply threaten lawyers that if the lawyers request to make a plea on another matter, they will send their clients back to jail. Justice deserves better,” he added.

Disapproving the CJI’s decision to cancel Roy’s interim bail, Dhavan said, ‘It is most unfortunate that the CJI made uncharitable comments about me as a lawyers and my conduct in court behind my back.” Narrating the sequence of events, Dhavan said, “The CJI lost his temper and passed an order directing my client to go back to jail. I remonstrated that he had passed an order in temper and this was not fair. An order passed in temper, especially when all conditions are fulfilled, is both inappropriate and unbecoming.”

The CJI, while hearing Hooda after the morning order, reminded that this was not the first time Dhavan had behaved like this and recalled that his unpleasant conduct was recorded by a bench of Justices K S Radhakrishnan and J S Khehar in their May 6, 2014 judgment.

The judgment was on Roy’s writ petition, approved and signed by senior advocates Ram Jethmalani, Rajeev Dhavan, Rakesh Dwivedi, S Ganesh and Ravi Shankar Prasad, seeking recusal of the judges from hearing the petition challenging his detention since March 4, 2014. Senior advocate C A Sundaram had distanced himself from the bias argument.