Justice Joseph rues dictatorial attitude of collegium system

New Delhi: In a scathing attack on the collegium system, Justice Kurian Joseph who concurred with the main Supreme Court judgement on Friday quashing the NJAC law, said the dictatorial attitude of the collegium resulted in unmerited, if not bad appointments of judges and this affected the image of the judiciary..

In separate judgement he said “the Collegium system lacks transparency, accountability and objectivity. The trust deficit has affected the credibility of the Colle-gium system, as sometimes observed by the civic society. Quite often, very serious allegations and many a time not unfounded too, have been raised that its approach has been highly subjective.”

He said, “Deserving persons have been ignored wholly for subjective reasons, social and other national realities were overlooked, certain appointments were purposely delayed so as either to benefit vested choices or to deny such benefits to the less patronised, selection of patronised or favoured persons were made in blatant violation of the guidelines resulting in unmerited, if not, bad appointments, the dictatorial attitude of the Collegium seriously affecting the self-respect and dignity, if not, independence of judges, the court, particularly the Supreme Court, often being styled as the Court of the Collegium, the looking forward syndrome affecting impartial assessment, etc., have been some of the other allegations in the air for quite some time.”

He said “these allegations certainly call for a deep introspection as to whether the institutional trusteeship has kept up the expectations of the framers of the Constitution. Though one would not like to go into a detailed analysis of the reasons, I feel that it is not the trusteeship that failed, but the frailties of the trustees and the collaborators which failed the system. To me, it is a curable situation yet. The active silence of the Executive in not preventing such unworthy appointments was actually one of the major problems.”