New Delhi, Oct 5 (PTI) Emphasising the role of compassion in judicial work, Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant on Monday said the law’s first duty is to be understood by the people that it governs and understand them in return.
Speaking at the second Prof. (Dr) N R Madhava Menon Memorial Lecture here, the CJI said compassion in judging is neither sympathy nor charity but the discipline of seeing the whole human situation behind a case.
He called for legal aid at the police station, spaces where a child or a survivor can testify without facing the accused and judgments written in a language that litigants can read.
“The first is what we mean by compassion in judging. It is not sympathy nor charity and certainly not a thumb on the scales, but the discipline of seeing the whole human situation behind a case. For compassion without reason drifts into caprice and reason without compassion hardens into mere procedure,” the CJI said.
He said compassion should reach the “invisible victims” of the justice system — a survivor of gender-based violence, the family of an undertrial or a differently-abled person.
“Human understanding asks us to hear not only the parties before us, but also those whose voices never reach the record,” he said.
“Yet even for those who reach the courtroom, justice is felt long before it is pronounced. The third question, therefore, concerns process, and not merely outcome. For the survivor made to relive her trauma in the witness box, or the litigant who cannot follow the language of the proceedings, the process is what justice actually feels like. We must ask whether, for too many, it has itself become a trauma,” Justice Kant said.
Justice Vikram Nath, who is also the executive chairman of the National Legal Services Authority, said judges must be impartial but never indifferent to the cause of justice.
He said technology can make justice faster but it cannot make it fair.
“Technology can assist the judicial process and improve efficiency, but it can never replace empathy, human judgment and a judge’s lived experience,” he said.
Attorney General of India R Venkataramani also spoke on the occasion. PTI PKS RC
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