Central Public Information Officer, Supreme Court of India v Subhash Chandra Agarwal

Facts

• An applicant sought information under the Right to Information Act, 2005 on three matters.
• First, whether Judges of the Supreme Court and the High Courts had filed declarations of assets with the Chief Justice, and the contents of those declarations.
• Second, the correspondence between constitutional functionaries relating to the appointment of certain Judges of the Supreme Court, including files of the collegium.
• Third, information relating to an allegation that a Union Minister had attempted to influence a judicial decision.
• The Central Public Information Officer of the Supreme Court declined the requests, and the matter travelled through the Central Information Commission and the High Court before reaching the Supreme Court.
• It was argued for the Court's registry that the office of the Chief Justice of India is a distinct authority from the Supreme Court and is not itself a public authority under the Act, and that disclosure would erode judicial independence and the confidentiality on which the appointments process depends.

Issue

1. Whether the office of the Chief Justice of India is a public authority under the Right to Information Act; and how the demand for transparency is to be reconciled with judicial independence and with the confidentiality of the appointments process.

Held

• The office of the Chief Justice of India is a public authority within the Act, and is not an authority separate from the Supreme Court; the Court is one public authority of which the Chief Justice's office forms part. Judicial independence is not a shield against accountability: independence exists to serve the public and cannot be invoked against the public's right to know, and it is not undermined by disclosure made in accordance with a statute of general application. Competence to make an application, however, is not the same as entitlement to the information. Each request must be tested against the exemptions in the Act. The declarations of assets are personal information, so disclosure depends on the outcome of the public interest balance in the relevant exemption. The collegium's deliberations engage considerations of fiduciary relationship and confidentiality, and the Court indicated that the process would be better served by publishing the criteria and the reasons rather than the internal file. Independence of the judiciary and the right to information were both held to be constitutional values requiring accommodation rather than the subordination of one to the other.

Ratio Decidendi

Transparency and independence are not opposed values. Independence is instrumental: it exists so that the litigant receives an impartial adjudication, so it cannot be asserted as a personal privilege of Judges against the public in whose interest it is conferred. But a general right to information is exercised through a statute which itself provides exemptions, and the correct method is to apply those exemptions individually rather than to answer the question by a blanket rule either way.