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Supreme Court judges to disclose their assets

The decision comes after months of debate over making public the details of the higher judiciary, especially apex court judges and their families.

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The Supreme Court on Wednesday decided that its judges will declare their assets in public. This paves the way for high court (HC) judges to do the same, though there is no specific directive for them to do so. In the last few weeks, pressure had been building up on SC judges to declare assets following voluntary declarations by some HC judges.

The decision was taken at a full court meeting of 20 judges headed by chief justice KG Balakrishnan. It gives thrust to the SC’s 1997 resolution formulating the Restatement of the Values of Judicial Life affirming that a judge would voluntarily make a declaration of assets in the form of real estate or investments (held by the judge or his or her dependents) within “reasonable time of assuming office” and “reasonable time” in the case of sitting judges.

The judges had also resolved that whenever a judge makes an acquisition of a substantial nature, he or she shall disclose it within a reasonable time. This system, called in-house mechanism, also said: “The declaration so made should be for the purpose of record. The declaration made by the judges or the chief justice, as the case may be, shall be confidential.”

Wednesday’s decision does away with the precondition of “confidential”. Former chief justice of India JS Verma called the decision a “welcome step”. This also makes it easy for law minister M Veerappa Moily to frame an Act on judges’ disclosure of assets that he withdrew at the end of Parliament’s monsoon session since MPs wanted the confidentiality clause to go. About the prospective Act, Moily told DNA on Tuesday: “We’ll do it. We’ll arrive at a consensus.”

The HC judges who declared their assets include: Punjab and Haryana HC judge K Kannan, who revealed the same in his blog; Karnataka HC judge DV Shylendra Kumar, who challenged the authority of the chief justice of India (CJI) to speak on behalf of other judges in a newspaper article, thus inviting the CJI’s reaction that Kumar was a “publicity seeker”; and Madras HC judge K Chandru. Kumar and Chandru made the disclosures before the respective HC registrar-generals.

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