Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra and the four Supreme Court judges, who had addressed a press conference on January 12, held their longest meeting on Wednesday, The Indian Express reported. The meeting, called by the chief justice, was held in the Supreme Court premises in the afternoon and lasted for over an hour.
The four judges had earlier raised issues including the assignment of cases to specific benches, and the lack of a mechanism to deal with complaints against the chief justice. In a letter to Misra, the judges asked the chief justice to assign all important cases in the order of seniority.
Apart from the four judges – Jasti Chelameswar, Ranjan Gogoi, Madan Lokur and Kurian Joseph – judges AK Sikri, DY Chandrachud and UU Lalit were also present at Wednesday’s meeting, The Indian Express reported.
The newspaper quoted unidentified sources as saying that “there was nothing at the meeting to term as concrete progress other than the time that the meeting took”. There was no information on the proposal put forward by the four judges and the meeting appeared to be an attempt to pacify them.
On Monday, judge Chelameswar had said that an impartial and independent judiciary was essential for the survival of a liberal democracy. “One must constantly keep analysing and examining how exactly the institution is functioning,” the judge said at the launch of a book on the top court.
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