The Supreme Court has dismissed plea seeking the abolition of the Senior Advocate designation system which was filed by six advocates including Advocate Mathews Nedumpara and two others.
A bench comprising Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia and Justice CT Ravikumar have called the plea as another in the line of misadventures by Advocate Nedumpara and dismissed it.
The bench said that the system of designation cannot be said to untenable and against Article 14.
The bench further said that they have no hesitation to say that the plea is a misadventure at the behest of the petitioner.
The Court said that this was done as earlier orders had no bearing.
The Court had reserved its verdict in the matter on October 4 this year, after a day-long hearing.
The advocates who were part of filing the plea were Mathews Nedumpara, Rohini Mohit Amin, Maria Nedumpara, Rajesh Vishnu Adrekar, Hemali Suresh Kurne, and Sharad Vusudeo Koli, along with two others, an entrepreneur named Karan Kaushik, and a Chartered Accountant, Manisha Nimesh Mehta (petitioners).
As per the information the petitioners challenged the system of Senior designation on the ground that it creates a policy of divide by creating a special class of advocates with special rights, privileges, and status that were not available to ordinary advocates.
As a matter of fact, this is unconstitutional and violated the right to equality under Article 14 of the Constitution of India, they contended.
They further asserted that it violated the right to practice one’s profession under Article 19 and the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution.
The petitioners said due to the senior advocate designation system, the legal industry has been monopolised by a “small cabal” of designated advocates who have left the vast majority of meritorious lawyers as ordinary and given discriminatory treatment.
The petitioner said that it was only the relatives of judges, politicians, and existing senior counsel benefitted from this system/
It was also said that argued that this system has destroyed the justice delivery system beyond redemption.
The ambition to get such a designation makes younger members of the bar a slave to the bench, the petitioners further stressed.
Moreover, lawyers resort to sycophancy and cavass for votes, while those practicing in the lower judiciary are out of contention for the gown, they added.
In the year 2019,the Supreme Court had barred Nedumpara from practicing before it for a year after finding him guilty of browbeating judges.
The top court also dismissed a plea by the National Lawyers Campaign for Judicial Transparency and Reforms, which Nedumpara heads, challenging the current system of the designation of lawyers as Senior Advocates.