New Delhi:
The criticism that the Supreme Court has a lot of vacations is “completely unfounded” since the judges are working “24*7 and 365 days”, former Chief Justice of India (CJI) Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud has said.
In an exclusive interview with NDTV, Justice Chandrachud also said the Supreme Court of India is among the world’s top courts with the “longest duration of working days”. “You know there are Supreme Courts in other parts of the world where if a judge sits for a week on hearing cases, they would get a week off to actually deliver judgment,” he said.
The debate over the top court’s vacations has cropped up repeatedly. In 2022, then Union Law Minister Kiren Rijiju told Parliament that “there is a feeling among people of India that the long vacation which the courts obtain is not very convenient for justice-seekers”, and that it is his “obligation and duty to convey the message or sense of this House to the judiciary”.
Asked whether the world, at large, needs to be sensitised more towards the vacation of the top court, Justice Chandrachud said: “Absolutely. I completely agree with you. For the reason that even during the summers, it’s a partial court working period. The court does not close its shutters.”
He added: “The criticism that the court has too many vacations is completely unfounded because it doesn’t, you know. It’s not justified by what is the truth, which is, the judges are working 24*7, 365 days.”
The former CJI said the “first victim of a life on the bench is your own ability to spend time with your own family”. “So I’m making up for lost ground now, you know,” Justice Chandrachud, who concluded his tenure as the 50th CJI after two years on November 10, said.
In a written reply in the Rajya Sabha in February in 2023, Mr Rijiju said the top court has been working on an average of 222 days in a year. He said the Supreme Court Rules, 2013, which were notified in 2014, provide that the period of summer vacation shall not exceed seven weeks and the length of the length of the summer vacation and the number of holidays for the court shall be such as may be fixed by the Chief Justice, so as not to exceed 103 days, excluding Sundays not falling in the vacation and during court holidays.
All High Courts, on the other hand, have been normally working for 210 days in a year, according to a statement by the Ministry of Law and Justice in 2011. However, no data on the number of working days in the lower courts is maintained centrally, it said.
Justice Chandrachud said all the judges of the top court work throughout the week, that is, from Monday to Sunday. “There are no weekends for Supreme Court judges because on Saturdays and Sundays, you are doing two things. You are reading for the Monday’s cases, 70 or 80 cases, and you are delivering judgments which have been held back in reserve, either that week or the previous week. In the summer, the so-called summer vacation, it’s not a vacation,” he said.
He explained that critical constitutional cases or those involving important questions of law are mainly the ones that are dealt with during the vacations. “It’s only when you have a mini break or a longer break, say, a mini break like for Holi or for Diwali that judges get down to doing all this work,” he said.
“Occasionally, you know, judges would go out of town. But even when they go out of town, say, on a Friday evening and come back on Saturday, they are addressing students of law colleges. They are conducting legal aid camps. So that’s equally a part of the functioning of a contemporary judge. So it’s not that judges have, you know, unlimited time off or, you know, time to spend with their families,” he added.
In the past, several judges, including former CJI N V Ramana, have said that there is a misconception that judges stay in ultimate comfort and enjoy their holidays.
