Politicians rule, say judges' junkets wrong

JUDGES ON JOURNEY: CNN-IBN investigation proves senior judges flouted norms on travel.

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New Delhi: The Government admits that judges combine foreign tours with holidays while going for seminars; they take long detours and take their spouses along. They do this at the taxpayers’ expense and political parties want a stop to it.

CNN-IBN used the Right to Information Act and found that Chief Justice of India K G Balakrishnan made an 11-day trip to South Africa in August 2007. The route he took was Delhi, Dubai, Johannesburg, Nelspruit, Capetown, Johannesburg, Victoria Falls (trip dropped), Dubai and Delhi.

Y K Sabharwal, when he was the Chief Justice of India, attended three conferences in 2005 at Edinburgh, Washington and Paris. The conferences were for 11 days but Sabharwal was out for 38 days. He converted 21 days into a private visit.

His itinerary included a detour from Washington to Baltimore, Orlando and Atlanta before joining the conference in Paris. The Government paid the first class airfare for Sabharwal’s entire trip.

Former chief justice G B Pattnaik called for the Government to take action. “The Government must not pay for judges’ private trips. If they are paying they are spineless,” he said.

Union Law Minister H R Bhardwaj though said the judges were doing nothing wrong. "They (judges) also need comfort, they also need to go out. Why they should be deprived of it? How can you deprive the wife? You are a woman. You should understand,” Bhardwaj told CNN-IBN’s correspondent.

Political parties rejected the Government’s stand. "Certainly one would expect that those who uphold the law of the land will follow the rules that are laid down in this connection,” said Congress spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan.

CPI-M leader Sitaram Yechury demanded a legislation to bring accountability among judges. “There should be a national judicial commission, which will go into the veracity of these allegations,” he said.