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Appointment of Judges to the Higher Judiciary during the Pandemic—II
The impact of the appointment process for high court and Supreme Court judges following the recommendations of the collegium is examined. The functioning of the collegium itself was not significantly affected by the pandemic. However, how many of its recommendations have been implemented by the union government, and how quickly, point to the need for the judiciary and the government to work together to ensure optimal judicial functioning.
This is the second part of a two-part series that examines how the pandemic has affected the process for appointment of judges to the higher judiciary. The first part examined how the Supreme Court collegium has functioned during the pandemic.
The author would like to thank Khushali Mahajan, intern at Vidhi Karnataka, for her assistance in data collection for this column.
The first part of this two-part series studied the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the process of appoint-ment of judges to the Supreme Court and the high courts in India (Kumar 2020). The focus was on the recommendations of the collegium, to see if the pandemic had an impact on the functioning of the collegium. An analysis of the resolutions and statements of the collegium uploaded on the Supreme Court website revealed that the collegium’s functioning did not seem to have been much impeded by the pandemic. The collegium seemed to function at about the same level of efficiency as it did in some of the past years for which data is available.
Recommendations of the collegium constitute one part of the appointment process for judges of the high courts and the Supreme Court. They are then supposed to be processed by the union government, and warrants of appointment or transfers are issued in the President’s name.
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