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New Delhi: Union Law Minister M Veerappa Moily will on Monday introduce in Parliament a bill making it mandatory for high court and Supreme Court judges to disclose their assets to the President every year.
Named ‘The Judges (Declaration of Assets and Liabilities) Act, 2009’, the bill would however keep the judges’ disclosures confidential under normal circumstances and would be out of the ambit of the RTI Act. They can be accessed and made public only in special circumstances, like in case of any probe into judicial misconduct or impropriety against a judge.
A senior Law Ministry official, however, said that the proposed law envisages disclosure of assets by judges to their respective chief justices.
The high court judges would disclose their assets to their respective chief justices, while the apex court judges would give annually the details of their assets to the Chief Justice of India, who, in turn would forward it to the President along with the details of their own assets.
After its introduction in Parliament, the bill is likely to be referred to a Parliamentary panel for detailed examination.
The process of enacting the law to ensure greater transparency about the judges’ assets was set in motion after a query posed to the Supreme Court registry seeking disclosure of the assets of the apex court judges.
The query had been posed under India’s new transparency law, the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005.
As the apex court registry refused to divulge the information, the registry’s decision was challenged before the Central Information Commission, which ruled on January 6, 2009 in favour of the applicant.
The apex court subsequently went in appeal before the Delhi High Court challenging the CIC ruling. The lawsuit is still pending at the high court.
But amid the mounting criticism of the judiciary’s reluctance to disclose the judges’ assets, Chief Justice of India KG Balakrishnan has agreed to ask judges to disclose their assets in case the government wants it and make a law for it.
With the judiciary shedding its reluctance on this matter, the government finally decided to enact the law for the purpose.