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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India's Legal Reforms Process Facing Multiple Crises -Saurav Datta

India's Legal Reforms Process Facing Multiple Crises -Saurav Datta

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published Published on Dec 10, 2016   modified Modified on Dec 10, 2016
-TheWire.in

A report by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy found that on an average, a law took 261 days to come into force and 14% of laws took a whopping 1000 days to become implementable.

The term ‘legal reform’ has caught the imagination of policymakers, the judiciary and the general public, taking everyone by storm. Suddenly, everybody is clamouring to usher in new laws and weed out redundant ones. The government and the Law Commission have also jumped onto the bandwagon by implementing a slew of new measures to reform laws. However, a crucial aspect of the entire process remains ignored – the quality of Indian lawmaking and also law amending, which functions as the fulcrum of any kind of legal reform.

Moreover, significant legal incidents often prompt a flurry of measures, especially the demand to establish special courts to deliver expeditious justice; even though legal scholars and jurists usually contend that justice should be timely, not hasty.

Now, a report by the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy seeks to shed more light on the quality lawmaking in India.

Vidhi’s findings underscore why special courts are not really ‘special’ when it comes to delivering justice; rather, they often become vehicles of sloth and injustice.

“Lawmaking and legal reform in India has been, and continues to be made on the basis of anecdote, intuition and common sense, in the absence of any rigorous collection or analysis of empirical evidence,” the report states. This “common sense” is often defined and directed by political expediency and other calculations, mostly aimed at securing brownie points with the powers that be.

More importantly and perhaps for the first time in India, the report focuses on how the quality of legislative debates affects lawmaking. The researches have also crunched some numbers to gauge how effectively laws are actually implemented. And the picture is pretty bleak.

Not only is there an inordinate amount of time between when a Bill is first proposed and when it is passed, but there is also a large gap between when a Bill is formally passed into law and when it is notified in the Official Gazette (which is when a law becomes enforceable).

Analysing a data set of 44 laws enacted by the parliament between 2015 and 2016, the report found that on an average, a law took 261 days to come into force and 14% of laws took a whopping 1000 days to become implementable!

Moreover, to add to these problems, the rules for implementing the substantive provisions of an Act are rarely accessible to the general public and are seldom discussed in either house of parliament.

For instance, in June 2015, the Maharashtra government, via a circular, mandated that the performance of public prosecutors would be evaluated by the number of convictions they manage to secure. In a legal system, where numerous people are deprived of their right to a fair criminal trial for multifarious reasons, such a mandate is particularly significant and needs to be discussed and debated before being implemented. assumes significance and needs to be discussed and debated. But, the circular was in Marathi and so was not debated in the state assembly.

Please click here to read more.

TheWire.in, 10 December, 2016, http://thewire.in/85811/legal-reforms-process-crises/


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