It’s time a performance audit of HC judges is done: Supreme Court

NEW DELHI: High court judges taking breaks “unnecessarily” and too often found a mention in Supreme Court bench of Justices Surya Kant and N Kotiswar Singh on Tuesday, which called for their performance audits.A bench of Justices Surya Kant and N Kotiswar Singh said the top court was receiving several complaints against HC high court judges and it was a high time to assess the expenditure on them vis-a-vis their output.“There are some judges who work very hard but at the same time there are judges who are unnecessarily taking coffee breaks; this break or that break. We are hearing a lot of complaints about HC judges. This is a larger issue which needs to be looked into. What is the performance of HC judges? How much we are spending and what is the output? It’s high time we do a performance audit,” Justice Kant said.The remark came on a plea of four persons who had moved SC claiming Jharkhand HC had reserved its order on a criminal appeal against conviction and life sentence in 2022 but the judgment was not pronounced. Their counsel Fauzia Shakil said after SC’s nudge, HC on May 5 and 6 pronounced the verdicts, acquitting three of the four. The last case resulted in a split verdict and was referred to HC chief justice and the petitioner was granted bail.Shakil said that despite the verdicts, the acquitted persons were not released from jail and in the judgments, HC did not mention the date of reserving the orders.Taking exception, SC asked Jharkhand govt counsel to immediately release them before lunch break & posted the matter post 2pm. The counsel informed SC that the convicts were released. and it was due to the non-availability of release orders from the trial courts that delayed the process.The timeline prescribed earlier by this court for pronouncement of judgments will have to be adhered to along with mechanism which this court will propose, the bench said and directed the registry to collate data from HCs and posted the matter in July.