No Supreme Court Bench to decide important RTI issues even after 22 months
18 Sep, 2012A division bench of the Supreme Court had decided in respect of three cases regarding the Right to Information (RTI) Act that these need to be decided by a Constitution Bench. This happened nearly two years back but the constitution bench is yet to see the light of the day. The issues which still remain in dark and have yet to even come up for hearing as no bench has yet been constituted.
The SC decision pertained to three cases
- The applicant asked whether all the SC judges had filed their assets and liabilities to the Chief Justice of India or not. This lead to the question whether the office of the Chief Justice of India is a public authority under the RTI Act (the applicant had not sought the copies of the declarations, but only the information whether any such declarations were filed or not). The full bench of CIC decided in favour of disclosure on January 6, 2009 which was upheld by the three member bench of Delhi High Court on January 12, 2010;
- An application filed under the RTI Act seeking copies of correspondence exchanged between concerned constitutional authorities with file notings relating to appointment of Justice H L Dattu, A K Ganguly and R M Lodha in the SC superseding seniority of Justice P Shah.
- Another RTI application seeking copies of documents related to revelation by Justice R Raghupati of Madras HC about some Union minister having approached him in some matter pending before the hon’ble judge in his court is yet to be taken by the SC.
Another RTI application was filed to know about the proposed Constitution Bench. In June 2011, he was informed that when the matter was placed before Hon’ble Chief Justice of India on 8th December, 2010, he asked the Registrar to place the matter after holidays. When the matter was placed before Hon’ble Chief Justice of India on 21st January, 2011, the Hon’ble Chief Justice of India asked the Registrar to put the said matter later.