Collegium system: Centre to cite old rulings

New Delhi: Even as a five-judge Constitution bench of the Supreme Court will hear suggestions from senior lawyers and the Attorney General Mukul Rohatgi, for improving the collegium system of judicial appointments, following the quashing of the NJAC law on October 16, the Centre has decided to oppose any tinkering with collegium by five-judges.

The Centre feels that the issue should be decided by nine-judges. While declaring as unconstitutional the Constitution bench comprising Justices J.S. Khehar, J. Chelameswar, Madan B. Lokur, Kurian Joseph and A.K. Goel had held that the collegium system that was in existence prior to the enactment of the Constitution Amendment and NJAC laws would be revived. But considering the criticism that the collegium system is opaque and not transparent the Bench decided to hear suggestions for improving the system.

Admitting flaws in collegium system, the court had said “All that was needed to keep the collegium system on the rails was the unstinted cooperation of the executive and an effective implementation strategy, with serious and meaningful introspection and perhaps some fine tuning and tweaking to make it more effective. Unfortunately, the executive did not respond positively, perhaps due to its misunderstanding of the decisions of this Court.”

There are 400 vacancies of Judges in the High Courts and three vacancies in the apex court and the collegium is vested with the huge responsibility to make recommendations for filling these vacancies, which has resulted in huge backlog of cases in various High Courts. However, the Centre has decided to raise preliminary objection on jurisdiction of  five-judges to suggest  improvement in collegium system ev-olved by a nine-judge bench in 1993, reiterated in 1998.