Willing to give info on assets under RTI: Supreme Court
Sidharth
as reported by Sh. Dhananjay Mahapatra, TNN 2 October 2009
NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court, which missed the Delhi High Court's
September 30 deadline for supplying information about declaration of
assets of
judges to an applicant under the RTI Act, on Thursday said it was
willing to do so.
Except for this concession, the apex court was unwilling to accept the
single judge's judgment and has readied an appeal to be filed before a
division Bench of the HC on Monday.
On an application by Subhash C Agrawal, the Central Information
Commission (CIC) had directed the PIO of the SC to provide information
whether or not the judges have been declaring assets under the 1997
in-house resolution. This was challenged by the SC before a single
judge Bench, which had differed with the apex court's stand.
Notwithstanding the intervening development -- a full court resolution
of August 26 by the SC to post the asset declaration on the official
website -- the apex court said the HC judgment "raises far reaching
and substantial constitutional questions relating to the institutional
integrity of the court, particularly the higher courts, independence
of judiciary, the position of judges individually and the judiciary as
an institution under the Constitution and the offices of the Chief
Justice of India and the Chief Justices of HCs."
It could not file the appeal before the September 30 deadline as by
then the HC had closed for a week on account of puja holidays. And the
SC did not want to give the information about the judges' asset
declaration to Agrawal fearing that he would have taken a stand before
the division Bench that the appeal was infructuous since the SC had
already complied with the HC's directive.
"After filing of this appeal, the SC will make the information sought
for by Agrawal available to him, without prejudice to the rights and
contentions of the apex court and subject to right to claim of
appropriate interim relief," stated the appeal drafted by advocate
Devdatt Kamat and settled by Attorney General G E Vahanvati.
The single judge of the HC, Justice Ravindra Bhat, had on September 2
directed the CPIO of the SC to release information sought by Agrawal.
It had said that Agrawal wanted to know whether the judges declare
their assets regularly or not and clarified that he had not asked for
the contents of the declaration of assets made by the apex court
judges.