-The Indian Express   The Supreme Court has now indicated its willingness to examine recent examples of bail being denied to high-profile politicians and businesspersons, in contradiction of our higher courts’ established injunction that “bail is the rule and jail is the exception”. The matter came up in a hearing on Ashok Kumar Sinha, an associate of former Jharkhand Chief Minister Madhu Koda, who has been in interim custody for two years...

-The Indian Express   With the denial of bail to 2G spectrum scam accused becoming a matter of debate, the Supreme Court today said it would examine the matter of courts denying bail in high profile cases.   The decision was taken by a bench comprising Justices Altamas Kabir, S S Nijjar and J Chelameshwar after a senior advocate argued that courts are not granting bail in cases that are “media-driven” and that “judges...

-The Times of India   In what could spell major trouble for TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu, the AP High Court on Monday directed the CBI, Enforcement Directorate (ED) and state police to independently probe the allegations that he and his associates amassed wealth by plundering public assets. The court was responding to a petition filed last month by the late CM YS Rajasekhara Reddy's widow and YSR Congress MLA, Vijayamma. All...

Father Cedric Prakash is a human rights and peace activist based in Ahmedabad. He has campaigned for the justice of the victims of the 2002 communal violence on peril of being publicly branded as “non-Gujarati and non-Hindu” by chief minister Narendra Modi. A resident of Gujarat for nearly 40 years, Prakash is the founding director of Prashant, a centre for human rights, peace and justice. He was named Chevalier of the...

The parliamentary panel examining the Lokpal bill is learnt to have formulated a five-stage mechanism that separates investigation from prosecution, and maintains “equilibrium in the holy trinity” of CBI, CVC and the proposed Lokpal. On the question of whether to include the prime minister in the Lokpal’s purview, opinion in the standing committee, sources said, has narrowed to two points of view: keeping the PM out and, including the PM with...