The Central Information Commission in a significant order has said that the Chief Justice of India or the Supreme Court could not claim total immunity of disclosing any information under Right to Information about the appointment of a judge and other issues concerning judiciary except in certain exceptional cases where there was the protection under the Constitution.
“All information relating to the in-house procedure of the Supreme Court and vigilance matters relating to the judges of the high court and SC should not be disclosed, (but) we cannot agree that every information held in the office of the CJI should not be disclosed till the constitutional bench officially disposes of the issues referred to it by the division bench in the case,” a bench headed by CIC Satyendra Mishra held.
“It cannot be anybody’s case that the change in the procedure of judges should happen completely outside the notice or knowledge of citizens of India and that citizens of India Should not be given an opportunity to articulate their views,” the CIC said.
The order assumes significance as the CJI and SC had been resisting on parting with any information under RTI about the judiciary’s internal affairs.
“Acceptance of this argument would virtually mean the complete exclusion of the CJI from the scope of RTI Act which certainly is not the case,” the CIC said while deciding a bunch of questions raised in an RTI application about the applicability of RTI Act to the CJI and SC.
The CIC said that there was no “express” provision in the RTI Act to exclude CJI from the ambit of the RTI.
Had the “intent” of Parliament been so, then it would have made an “express” provision to exclude the office of the CJI from the ambit of the act, the commission said while disposing an application of RTI activist Subhash Chandra Agrawal.
Regarding the disclosure of information about judges’ appointment procedure, the CIC said any correspondence between the law ministry and CJI on the issue could not fall in the same category, which could not be parted with under RTI so far as the information was in the domain of a public authority.