Chennai: Madras high court has directed the Tamil Nadu government to introduce norms for appointments of law officers for courts in the state as per recent observations of Supreme Court.
The first bench of Chief Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul and Justice R. Mahadevan before which a batch of PIL’s challenging the appointments of law officers came up for hearing, has granted eight weeks to the government to submit the report.
The petitioners submitted that law officers should know law and not be political leaders as law officers conduct cases on behalf of the state and not on behalf of the ruling party.
In reality, sympathisers of whichever party comes to power are appointed as law officers. The bench said it wants to ensure that future appointments are done as per proper norms. Also, it wanted to know if any process was followed in the appointments already done.
The state government must show what procedure was followed for making these appointments, the bench said. The bench has granted eight weeks for the advocate general to establish proper norms for future appointments of law officers in Tamil Nadu and Puducherry and granted three weeks to furnish details about the appointments already made.
The matter was posted for further hearing to October 20, 2016.
