Fair advocacy as a right
The article is about how costly the judicial system has become today due to high fees of lawyers.
A recent study demonstrates that the Supreme Court is a court too far away from the common man (Frontline, April 20-May 3, 2013). The alienation is not due to geographical or institutional reasons alone. Lawyering, by and large, has become a big industry. The distinction between the profession and the trade is blurred. The pity, however, is that often it lacks even the fairness of trade.
So some suggestions are made to curb this menace:
1. Need for standardisation : Though there is a lack of standardisation and certainty in many areas of legal remuneration, the levy of “shockingly exorbitant fees” should lead to disciplinary action.
There are state legislations regulating the lawyer’s fees in the subordinate courts and even in the High Court in civil and criminal matters. Often, those are framed by the High Court by invoking power under Articles 225 and 227 of the Constitution. The rules regarding fees payable to advocates in Kerala designed by the Kerala High Court after approval by the Governor is a fine example (Kerala Gazettedated 22.7.1969). It is a tragedy that the practice of law in the constitutional courts is not controlled by any law whatsoever.
2. Classification of lawyers
Senior lawyers are designated by the court. Section 16(2) of the Advocates Act - an advocate can be designated as senior if “the Supreme Court or the High Court is of the opinion that by virtue of his ability, [standing at the Bar or special knowledge or experience in law] he is deserving of such distinction.” Note that the statute does not insist on any ethical parameter in deciding the question of designation. The prescribed application in some States inter alia asks for income tax details. Behind it, there is an incorrect and unacceptable postulate that the more the income, the more eminent the lawyer.
It is time the statutory concept of eminence is radically altered by way of appropriate amendment.
3. Independent boards should oversee the profession in the best interest of the litigants.
4. Chapter II under Part VI of the Bar Council of India Rules deals with “Standards of Professional Conduct and Etiquette.” The rules also need appropriate amendment encompassing excessive bills.
5. On account of the indiscriminate conferment of seniorship, there is a clear negation of the perceived equity and equality among the bar members.
6. There is a clear deficit in the legislations, which has the effect of infringing on the common man’s right, the Supreme Court needs to lay down the law even by way of judicial legislation as done in Vishaka (1997) and Vineet Narain (1998).
A disturbing G7 decision
The March 24 decision by seven major industrial countries (the G7) to suspend Russia from the informal grouping called the G8 is not surprising in view of Russia’s annexation of the Ukrainian province of Crimea. Specifically, the G7 announced in what it called the Hague Declaration — made on the sidelines of the global Nuclear Security Summit — that it would not attend the forthcoming G8 summit in Sochi and would instead meet as the G7 in Brussels; it has also threatened “co-ordinated sectoral sanctions” if Moscow continues to “escalate this situation.” Russia has been a G8 participant since 1998, under a general plan to strengthen East-West relations. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov had earlier shrugged off the possibility of expulsion, pointing out that as the G8 has no formal membership no country can be expelled from it; in addition, the Ukrainian embassy in the Netherlands has reported Mr. Lavrov as saying Russia had no intention of using military force in eastern and southern Ukraine, and that if the situation worsens, Ukrainian-Russian contacts will occur at the foreign ministry and defence ministry levels.
The G7 decision is, however, open to exploitation.
1. To start with, the G7 has apparently accepted the appointment of many Ukrainian ministers with neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic backgrounds.
2. Secondly, NATO has asserted that Russia plans a Crimea-type move for the autonomous Moldovan territorial unit of Transnistria, where Russian is the official language and the most widely used one; Moscow rejected a 2006 poll there showing that 96 per cent of the population favoured joining Russia.
3. Western militaries and arms manufacturers also stand to benefit from another Cold War. Former British Chief of Staff Lord Dannatt has called for a new brigade of 3,000 troops to be sent to Germany, while current plans are to remove all 20,000 such troops from that deployment, which dates from 1945.
4. Given that European Union countries buy Russian oil and natural gas for hard currency, anti-Russian sanctions mean that western oil corporations will welcome British Prime Minister David Cameron’s immediate call for more fracking, which is a highly controversial activity in his country.
5. Financial bodies, nevertheless, may not like sanctions; Visa and MasterCard have resumed services to customers of Russia’s SMP Bank.
‘Judges are not immune from charges of sexual harassment at workplace’
Judges, howsoever high, are not immune from charges of sexual harassment at workplace if and when such a charge is made and proved, a Supreme Court-appointed panel has said.
In its report submitted to the court on Wednesday, the panel said a continuous course of sexual harassment of women at workplace, if established, would amount to “proved misbehaviour” and would be a ground for removal from high office. If a charge of sexual harassment at work place was made against retired judges of the Supreme Court or the High Court manning judicial tribunals, they would not be protected by the shield of irremovability from office. It wanted the Supreme Court to devise measures similar to the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013.
Beware of ‘Dendroid,’ Android phone users warned
Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) has issued an alert asking all Android smartphone users to beware of a deadly virus ‘Dendroid,’ “the malicious application” through which an attacker can “completely compromise the affected smartphone and control it remotely.”
We stepped in as govt. failed to bring back black money: Supreme Court
The Supreme Court on Wednesday slammed the Centre for its failure to bring back thousands of crores of black money stashed away in banks abroad.
A Bench, dismissing an application filed by the Centre to recall a July 4, 2011 order appointing a special investigation team to take steps to bring back the black money, said the court stepped in after six decades as the government failed in its duty
Asteroid with rings found
Astronomers said Wednesday they had found rings around an asteroid, the smallest object known to have this feature and only the fifth after Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The twin rings around a rock called Chariklo were spotted in June last year as it passed in front of a star, scrutinised by seven telescopes dotted over a 1,500-kilometre stretch of South America.
As expected, the star seemed to vanish for a few seconds as Chariklo blocked its light — a phenomenon known as occultation, an international team reported in the science journal Nature . But the mini-eclipse turned out to be much more than the astronomers were expecting.
Changes sought in renewable energy policy
India can save up to 78 per cent in subsidies provided to the green energy sector by making adjustments to its renewable energy policies, according to a new study.
As per this joint study from Climate Policy Initiative (CPI) and the Bharti Institute of Public Policy at the Indian School of Business (ISB), India’s current wind and solar policies were not as cost-effective as they could be.
- For wind energy, reducing debt cost to 5.9 per cent and extending tenor by 10 years can cut the cost of total federal and state support by up to 78 per cent.
- For solar energy, which is more capital-intensive, reducing debt cost to 1.2 per cent and extending tenor by 10 years can cut the cost of support by 28 per cent,” the study says.
However, the report said cost-effectiveness was not the only goal outlined in Indian renewable energy plans. “Other goals, such as maximising deployment given a fixed annual federal budget, incentivising production, and supporting renewable energy without requiring state support, are also important to policymakers,” it said.
So we need to have a renewable energy policy which is:
- cost effective
- maximising deployment
- incentivising production
- supporting renewable energy without requiring state support
EU to ban Indian mangoes, vegetables
European Union member states, on Wednesday, decided to ban the import of five types of fruits and vegetables from India, after several batches were found to be contaminated by pests such as fruit flies, the bloc’s executive said.
The prohibition, which goes into effect in May, covers mangoes, aubergines, the taro plant and two types of gourd. These represent less than 5 per cent of the bloc’s fresh fruit and vegetable imports from India, according to the European Commission.
The EU’s executive also said there were ‘significant shortcomings’ in the certification systems that prevent contaminated goods from being exported. The ban, agreed by a committee of experts representing member states, is to be reviewed by the end of 2015.
WTO asks India to remove raw sugar export subsidy
A few WTO members, including Australia, have asked India to remove immediately the export subsidy of Rs.3,300 a tonne on raw sugar, saying it distorts the global trade.
This demand was raised in the recent meeting of the Agriculture Committee of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Geneva.
On March 3, the Central Government notified export subsidy of Rs.3,300 a tonne on raw sugar shipments undertaken during the February-March of this year.
In its reply, India said the policy was designed to encourage diversification away from white sugar to raw sugar and that no intervention payments had been paid yet.
China’s rare earth trade limits break global rules
China has broken the rules of global commerce by restricting exports of rare earths, tungsten and molybdenum, a move that benefitted domestic industries, a World Trade Organization panel said on Wednesday.
A WTO disputes settlement panel said that Beijing’s deployment of export duties and quotas, plus limits on who could trade in what are key raw materials for making electronic goods, skewed global commerce unfairly against fellow nations.
Abel Prize for Russian mathematician
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awarded Russian mathematician Yakov Sinai the Abel Prize for mathematics for his pioneering work in math and for bridging the gap between math and physics.
For India, which has successfully kept naturally-occurring ‘wild’ polioviruses at bay for three whole years, a new challenge looms.
India is among 140 countries that rely on the oral polio vaccine (OPV). These countries have now been asked to introduce an injectable inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) into their routine childhood immunisation programme by the end of next year.
The oral vaccine, which is cheap and easily administered, uses live but weakened forms of the poliovirus. But the live vaccine viruses can occasionally revert to virulence.
Vaccine-derived viruses can gain the ability to transmit within communities and even pass from one country to another. Such ‘circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses’ (cVDPV) have struck over 700 children since the year 2000, producing outbreaks in several countries, including Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nigeria and Somalia.
More than 95 per cent of the cVPDV cases in recent years have been of the type 2 strain (the poliovirus has three strains, types 1, 2 and 3). Polio caused by a wild type 2 virus was, on the other hand, last seen 15 years back.
The Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI), which coordinates the global fight again polio, therefore wants to stop all use of OPV that contains the type 2 vaccine strain. Trivalent OPV, with all three types of vaccine strains, is to be replaced by bivalent OPV with only type 1 and type 3 vaccine strains.
But before making that switch, the GPEI has asked all countries using trivalent OPV to introduce at least one dose of the injectable IPV vaccine into their routine immunisation programme. IPV, which is more expensive, uses killed forms of the three types of wild viruses and carries no risk of reversion to virulence. This vaccine would provide protection against any type 2 vaccine-derived viruses lingering in the environment.
But for IPV to be effectively deployed, routine immunisation coverage has to be improved.
Lessons from India's success in polio eradication are being used to enhance routine immunisation and reach under-served communities. This includes
- drawing up comprehensive micro-plans for routine immunisation,
- intensively training frontline health workers who will carry out vaccinations and
- putting in place monitoring systems so that corrective measures can be taken when needed.
China has started constructing a $330-million underground neutrino detector this week which, upon completion, will have similar goals as the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) coming up in Theni, Tamil Nadu. Situated at a site 150 km west of Hong Kong, the Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Observatory (JUNO) is being built underground by the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP), Beijing.
It will supplement the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, a China-based multinational neutrino physics centre located 52 km northeast of Hong Kong that has been operating since 2011. In fact, as Daya Bay studies neutrinos coming through space toward Earth, JUNO will study those from two nuclear reactors being constructed at locations some 50 km away.
Neutrinos are colloquially called “ghost particles” because
1. they travel at almost the speed of light,
2. hardly interact with matter, and
3. are very light.
Therefore, trapping and measuring a neutrino requires extremely sensitive equipment shielded from interfering radiation.
There are three kinds, or flavours, of neutrinos, designated 1, 2 and 3. Each flavour is known to spontaneously transform into the other, a process called oscillation that is characteristic of particles that have mass. However, physicists have been unable to measure their masses. What they have been able to accomplish is find their difference. Of late, interest has grown in the mass of neutrino-3 with respected to the other two, which is what INO and JUNO will study. Together, these detectors will join the already operating Hyper-Kamiokande in Japan and the NOvA in the U.S.
The handful of unusual events observed in the underground experiments at the Kolar Gold Field (KGF) mines during the 1960-70s and the 1980s, which have remained unexplained to this day, may have been due to the decays of hitherto unseen Dark Matter (DM) particles.
The postulate of DM was put forward to account for the extreme velocities with which galaxies and clusters of galaxies are observed to be rotating that the gravity generated by their observable matter alone cannot explain. At such speeds they should have been torn apart long ago. It is believed that something that cannot be seen directly with light (electromagnetic radiation, in general) — and hence the name — is providing that extra mass, generating the extra gravity, needed to hold them together.
DM dominates the matter in the universe, outweighing all the visible matter by nearly six times, but its existence can be inferred only from the gravitational effect it seems to have on visible matter. Though existence of DM is now accepted, and it is all around us with varying densities, its nature has remained a mystery and various candidate DM particles have been proposed.
MCQs related to above news are here
MCQs related to above news are here
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