While people are more aware of their rights now, the courts have also decided to relax the procedural laws that made justice easily accessible to people, said Justice Indu Malhotra, Former Judge of the Supreme Court of India at AIMA Aspire’s WomenSpeak Session.
[Excerpts below…]
Public Interest Litigation is an essence. It is a petition filed by a public-spirited person who has no personal interest or animus. He brings an issue concerning a public cause before the courts and the courts are only the Supreme Court and the High Court which exercise writ jurisdiction. And he is not the Dominus Litis of the litigation. Dominus Litis means master of the litigation. Suppose he decides to, you know, remove his name from the proceedings, the proceedings will continue if the court finds merit in it. And he is not an aggrieved person. And the nature of these proceedings is not supposed to be adversarial. That is how PILs were conceived at the threshold. of public law litigation was in the United States in the year 1953 with the judgment in the Brown versus Board of Education case wherein they sought to set aside discrimination, racial discrimination between the Americans and black Americans of African origin who were seeking admission to educational institutions.