Public trust and public approval are not same; trust means fairness of process: CJI Surya Kant

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, Union Law Minister Arjun Ram Meghwal and Senior Advocate Mahesh Jethmalani at the 6th Ram Jethmalani Memorial Lecture in New Delhi on Monday. (Express photo by Anil Sharma)

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant on Monday said that public trust in the judiciary is not the same as public approval, as trust is not earned by giving outcomes people want but by ensuring fairness of process. He also emphasised that the courts should “remain willing to be examined, questioned and, where necessary, criticised”.

The CJI was delivering the keynote address at the 6th Ram Jethmalani Memorial Lecture in Delhi on Monday on the topic — ‘Justice seen to be done: Transparency and public trust as pillars of the legal system’.

Responding to concerns by other speakers, Senior Advocates Harish Salve and Mahesh Jethmalani, about the need for administrative reforms that the judiciary needs to carry out to address challenges like the appointment of judges, etc., the CJI said reform must be the rule and no institution can survive or take pride in remaining static.

“But then there are issues that may not be prudent to respond to from a public platform. I have legal answers to those questions in the historical background of how the Collegium system has been developed and how successfully it has worked…,” the CJI said. He added that “there is hardly any impediment between the appointments by the Union of India on the recommendations of the Collegium, that itself speaks what kind of deliberations take place and how ultimately the final recommendations are made. But at the same time, as I already said, reform is a welcome step.”

On administrative reforms to deal with complaints against judges, he said, “As CJI, I can say with full confidence that the mechanism (which) the Supreme Court and High Courts have developed is … robust, responsive and very timely.”

Flagging possible misuse, he said that “given a choice, a judicial officer, when he passes an interlocutory order, or adjourns a case or passes a final decree, at every stage he will invite a complaint. I will leave it to the public domain, and it is a very seriously debatable issue whether every such complaint should be brought on a (public) platform or a website or you need … an internal very strong mechanism which must with complete objectivity, dispassionate approach and in a very responsible manner … deal with it. I can assure that such a mechanism is well established, but it is always subject to reforms and qualitative improvements.”

Transparency for a court, the CJI said, is not simply a matter of open doors and public hearings, though it certainly includes those things. “It means that the reasoning behind a decision, and not merely its result, can be examined by anyone who cares to look, including the very people the decision goes against. A court that announces its verdicts but keeps its reasoning to itself has not really been transparent, whatever else it may have done,” he said.

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Pointing out that public trust is not the same thing as public approval, the CJI said the “difference matters a great deal”. A court, the CJI said, “does not earn trust by being liked, or by handing out the outcomes people wanted. It earns trust when the people who lost, who wanted an entirely different result, still walk away believing that the process which decided against them was fair. That is a far harder thing to earn than approval, and far more valuable”.

CJI Kant recalled that late Justice Krishna Iyer “knew that institutions do not stay clean by being shielded from scrutiny. They stay clean by being repeatedly exposed to it, and by repeatedly surviving that exposure”.

The CJI pointed out that in the suo motu proceedings concerning an NCERT textbook, which contained a chapter on corruption in the judiciary, it was an occasion to consider the relationship between legitimate criticism and public confidence in the institution. “In our order, we reiterated that the judiciary, as an institution, is not, and cannot be, averse to criticism… This lies at the heart of transparency itself, for a court cannot seek the confidence of the public by placing itself beyond scrutiny; it must remain willing to be examined, questioned and, where necessary, criticised,” CJI Kant said.

He underscored that public trust, for the judiciary, is “not decoration. It is, in fact, the only currency that authority is ever paid in, the only coin the judiciary has ever truly held.”

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“Transparency matters because it is what makes trust possible to earn in the first place. ‘Seen to be done’ means a fair hearing conducted honestly in the open, and it means, just as much, a system that remains willing to be examined, again and again, on whether it has kept its own word,” the CJI said.

Ananthakrishnan G. is a Senior Assistant Editor with The Indian Express. He has been in the field for over 26 years, kicking off his journalism career as a freelancer in the late nineties with bylines in The Hindu. A graduate in law, he practised in the District judiciary in Kerala for about two years before switching to journalism. His first permanent assignment was with The Press Trust of India in Delhi where he was assigned to cover the lower courts and various commissions of inquiry. He reported from the Delhi High Court and the Supreme Court of India during his first stint with The Indian Express in 2005-2006. Currently, in his second stint with the daily newspaper, he reports from the Supreme Court and writes on topics related to law and the administration of justice. Legal reporting is his forte though he has extensive experience in political and community reporting too, having spent a decade as Kerala state correspondent, The Times of India and The Telegraph. He is a stickler for facts and has several impactful stories to his credit. ... Read More