(Video) Rajya Sabha TV (RSTV) The Big Picture: RTI & Collegium

Topic: RTI & Collegium

Guest:

Desh Ratan Nigam, (Advocate Supreme Court)
Satya Prakash, (Legal Editor, The Tribune)
Subhash Chandra Agrawal, (RTI Consultant)

Topic Description:

Does the Right to Information (RTI) covers proceedings of the Collegium…

Collegium is a body of five senior most judges, including the Chief Justice of India… who decides on the elevation of judges in the High Court and the Supreme Court…

For long there has been a debate… on can collegium be covered under the RTI… The matter began in 2009 activist Subhash Chandra Aggrawal has filed an RTI seeking information on the correspondence between the Supreme Court collegium and the Centre on the appointment of judges…

The Supreme Court’s Central Public Information Officer had refused to share the information after which it came to the Central Information Commission (CIC), who ruled in Aggrawal’s favour… As the matter went to the High Court… Aggarwal’s contention was upheld again… The matter since then has been debated in the Supreme Court…

On Tuesday… in the latest round of hearing before the constitutional bench… Attorney General K.K. Venugopal representing the Supreme Court’s CPIO said that opening up the “highly-sensitive” correspondence of the Supreme Court’s collegium and its workings to the Right to Information (RTI) regime would make judges and the government “shy” and “destroy” judicial independence…

The AG also added that “Disclosure of highly sensitive communication under RTI will risk the very existence of the judicial way of functioning. So, the information should be kept confidential…”

So, what is an ambit of an RTI… and is there a need to share details of judicial proceedings and the functioning of the institution of judiciary…