CJI DY Chandrachud constitutes committee to make SC judgements available in regional languages
The Supreme Court has constituted a committee headed by Justice AS Oka for translation of top court’s judgments into regional languages, Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud said on Tuesday. The CJI was speaking at the inauguration of online e-Inspection Software of the High Court of Delhi.
Talking about the technological initiatives taken by the Supreme Court, CJI DY Chandrachud said that the top court has adopted initiation of translation of judgments to regional languages and constituted a committee in this regard. Prime Minister Narendra Modi also appreciated remark of CJI DY Chandrachud about making the judgments of the Supreme Court available in regional languages.
The CJI said that he has constituted a committee headed by Justice Abhay Oka and their first step is to ensure that judgments of the top court will be translated to four languages- Hindi, Tamil, Gujarati and Oriya.
“English isn’t comprehensive, particularly in the legal avatar to 99.9% of citizens, access to justice cannot be meaningful unless citizens are able to access and understand in a language which they speak and comprehend” the CJI said.
The CJI said that SC will be tapping into the talent of retired judicial officers to verify if these translations are done correctly. He also spoke about the new initiatives adopted since he took over as the CJI.
Speaking about the New Justice Mobile App, he said that the app has been introduced to enable access to information to advocates, AOR, journalists, litigants, every stakeholder of the system, with free access to the entirety of records.
On electronic Supreme Court reports, the CJI said that he has been working on this initiative for the last 6.5 years. He added that he has got SCR transformed to E-SCR, and requested lawyers to freely utilise. He added that the reports will have an elastic search facility, and has been made compatible with search engines where court records can be searched.
Talking about neutral citations, the CJI said he has constituted a committee headed by Justice Rajiv Shakdher and has also written to CJs of high courts to implement them in HCs across India.
The CJI also stressed the need to develop facilities at the top court. The CJI said he along with SC’s building committee would be visiting Delhi HC to examine the new facilities including new courtrooms, parking lots, and replicate them at SC.
“We were wondering how to now think of SC and its facilities for the next 50 years, as someone has to do it some time,” he said.
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