CUTTACK: Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik on Saturday underscored the need for restoration of an ethical outlook in the justice delivery system. Addressing a national seminar on ‘Judiciary, Ethics and Justice Delivery in India’, organised by the National Law University in collaboration with the Institute of Objective Studies, New Delhi here, the Chief Minister said that the greatest strength of the judiciary is the faith of the people in it. Faith, confidence and acceptability have to be earned, Naveen said and added that can only be done by developing an inner strength of morality and ethics. “We have examples from history that outstanding lawyers while pursuing the profession of law, never compromised on ethics,” he said. The Chief Minister said that today a lot of emphasis is given on mediation as an alternative to the dispute resolution. Stating that it serves the cause of ethics and considered cheap and timely, he said that it also helps to avoid excessive adjournments and long arguments by counsels. Stating that justice to an aggrieved person carries within it an element of ethics, Naveen said that ethics governs every aspect of life. Natural justice, the fountain of jurisprudence, is based on justice, he said and quoted Mahatma Gandhi who observed that there is no gap between truthfulness and law. In his welcome address, Dr Manzoor Alam, chairman of the Institute of Objective Studies, said that delay defeats justice and therefore the judicial system should be speedier. Dr Mool Chand Sharma, Vice-Chancellor of Central University of Haryana dwelt on the crisis facing most of the institutions of the country. Justice Deepak Mishra, judge of the Supreme Court, said that ethics can never be static. Despite the temporal nature of ethics that keep constantly evolving with time, personal values should never get in the way of collective values of judiciary, he said. Speaking on ‘Assessing the Performance of Judges: Search for Yardsticks in the plenary session’, justice VS Malimath said that it is not important how many court cases are disposed of, but how effectively justice has been meted out in those cases. In both the business sessions of the day, the theme Judicial Accountability: Practices and Perspective was discussed by Jayant Das, senior advocate, Supreme Court of India, and DP Choudhury, director, Odisha Judicial Academy. The first session was chaired by Justice DP Mohapatra, former chairman of the Odisha Human Rights Commission, and Dr Mool Chand Sharma presided over the second session.
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