Justice Sanjiv Khanna has taken oath because the 51st Chief Justice of India on the Rashtrapati Bhavan as we speak for a six-month tenure earlier than retiring in Could, 2025.
Justice Khanna will likely be changing outgoing CJI D Y Chandrachud and has a storied profession spanning circumstances regarding constitutional regulation, taxation, arbitration, business regulation, and environmental regulation.
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He has additionally been instrumental in delivering judgements on Digital Voting Machines (EVMs), electoral bonds and the abrogation of Article 370, amongst others.
Listed here are a few of his landmark judgements:
Arvind Kejriwal’s bail
Justice Sanjiv Khanna in July 2024 had granted interim bail to former chief minister Arvind Kejriwal whereas he was embroiled in a case beneath the Prevention of Cash Laundering Act, citing that there was no readability of whether or not there was a must arrest Kejriwal.
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Whereas he didn’t rule on the legality of the PMLA cost itself, he did carry up the necessary query of whether or not there have been any extra grounds for arrest and in the event that they had been justified.
EVM-VVPAT cross verification
Justice Khanna rejected all petitions in April 2024 questioning using Digital Voting Machines (EVMs) within the Lok Sabha elections. He clarified {that a} cross-verification of all votes or a return to paper ballots weren’t viable choices.
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He additionally directed the Election Fee of India to as an alternative introduce slips with the image or bar code of a celebration to be issued after every vote to simplify the counting course of. His judgement got here amidst huge outrage round EVMs and debate round their use/misuse.
Electoral bonds
In February of 2024, Justice Khanna as a part of a five-judge bench declared the controversial electoral bonds scheme unconstitutional as a result of considerations round transparency of donors and potential for corrupt practices.
Justice Khanna dismissed the argument that donor privateness utilized to donations made by way of banking channels, noting that financial institution officers liable for dealing with the bonds are conscious of the donors’ identities.
Abrogation of Article 370
Justice Khanna additionally performed a key function within the landmark 2023 resolution by a five-judge bench that upheld the abrogation of Article 370, which had granted particular standing to Jammu and Kashmir.
He was of the robust opinion that stripping away the particular standing of Jammu and Kashmir wouldn’t endanger the ideas of India’s federal construction.
RTIs and judicial independence
In an influential resolution that reaffirmed the coexistence of judicial independence and transparency, in 2019, he contributed to a ruling that acknowledged that the workplace of the Chief Justice of India may very well be topic to informations beneath the Proper to Info (RTI) Act.
He additionally acknowledged that the choice of whether or not the CJI’s workplace ought to fulfill the RTI requests should be decided on a case-by-case foundation. Within the judgement, Justice Khanna assigned accountability to the court docket’s Chief Public Info Officer (CPIO) for assessing whether or not disclosures in regards to the CJI serve the bigger public curiosity or violate privateness.
