COVID & THE RULE OF LAW
Updated: Sep 2, 2020

The phenomenal COVID-19 emergency has brought about significant social,
political, and legitimate difficulties all around. As nations of the world, far
and wide embrace crisis measures to address this emergency, they must keep
on maintaining the standard of law, secure and regard international
standards and fundamental principles of lawfulness, and the right to have
equity, cures, and fair treatment.
The United Nations Response to COVID-19
When humans run fast, nature puts a reverse gear. At present, the world is
under lockdown for renovation due to COVID 19, an infectious disease
caused by a coronavirus that was discovered recently in December 2019 in
Wuhan, the most populous city of China. COVID-19 has created havoc to
the normal functioning of the world. It seems that a small virus with the
negligible size is the reason for the World's lockdown originating in China
and soon spread to every part of the world affecting the world's economy to
a maximum. As people came from Wuhan to India and other affected
countries, they brought the deadly virus with them and infected their
country’s environment. As everything arrived at a halt, the world is
confronting difficulties in every sector and the battle to maintain the rule of
law is one of them. The Justice Delivery System of India is hardly known for
its speed, even in the best of times, it remains the same. Official information
shows that while the organization of new cases, both in the higher legal
judiciary and subordinate judiciary, has descended since the start of the
national lockdown on 25 March 2020 the disposal rate has also been seriously
influenced because of the constrained shutdown of courts. The judiciary has
gone under enormous strain to usher in, during this pandemic to offset
public health concern with access to justice.
Our Judicial framework has been the country's ethical inner voice, talking
truth to political power, maintaining the privileges of its citizens, interceding
the clashes between central and state government, giving equal justice to the
rich and poor the same, and on a few significant events, sparing democratic
rules itself. Notwithstanding its accomplishments, a lacuna between the ideal
and reality has been getting clearer throughout the years. Our justice
delivery system is moderate, the appointment of the jury has always been the
part of the controversy, disciplinary systems barely work, a chain of
stratification rather than calibre is considered, ladies are severely
discriminated and constitutional issues regularly grieve in the Supreme
Court for quite a long time. Justice Chelameswar said in his contradiction in
the NJAC judgment that the courts must change, with the goal that they can safeguard the constitution. The inherent issue with our judiciary is that the
cases continue accumulating in the depository of the courts and takes quite
a long while to be settled, there is defilement, absence of straightforwardness,
especially on account of the appointment of judges, under preliminaries of
the blamed and need for data and connection among people and courts.
IMPACT OF COVID-19 ON THE RULE OF LAW
1) There is a Decline in the Cases: With just restricted Benches managing
selected issues day by day, cases pending before constitution benches have
been set aside for later. In the whole month of April 2020, 82,725 cases were
recorded in India's courts, while disposing of 35,169 cases. In contrast to
2019, when the average number of cases recorded every month was around
14 lakh. While the average number discarded every month was 13.25 lakh.
On the whole, about 3.23 crore cases are pending in the 19,683 subordinate
courts in the nation, of which 90 lakh are civil cases and 2.32 crore are
criminal cases. As of now, there are over a sum of about 48.16 lakh cases
including civil and criminal cases.
2) The new ordinance of Social Distancing: Accessibility is the main function
of the judiciary system. The nature of settling the matter in a court is of
minimal utility to possible defendants if they can't get to it. All courts,
including the Supreme Court, high courts, and regional courts, have been
working in an exceptionally limited way. Most of the courts had chosen to
persevere with the limited working until 17 May 2020.
3) Judicial appointment slowed down: The procedure of the assignation of
judges also has been affected by Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdown.
Indeed, even before Covid-19, more than 35% of posts in high courts were
vacant out of 1,079 endorsed posts, 201 permanent ones, and 184 additional
judges’ positions were yet to be filled. Be that as it may, presently, the
assignation of more than 120 high court judges is pending with the Supreme
Court Collegium, while 50-odd new suggestions have been made by the
different high court collegiums.
4) Quasi-legal bodies have quit working: What is likewise confusing is how
procedures in over twelve courts have gone to a granulating end during the
lockdown despite these legal bodies being outfitted with video conferencing
technology. The focal zonal bench of the National Green Tribunal had been
hearing issues through video conferencing for almost two years yet quit
working since the lockdown. The people should have to bear the immense
cost for this impasse as the NGT had stayed at work on some key government-funded activities. With procedures now being delayed, cost
acceleration for these activities would in the long run be given to common
people.
The pandemic has been changing numerous aspects of our life and
compelling us to develop or grasp the novel changes. The legal executive isn't
insusceptible to this change. Now is the ideal opportunity for the reception
and advancement of online courts. As regards, there were a few endeavours
at the selection of innovation in the working of courts even before the
pandemic but were not implemented. An opportunity has now come to
receive these innovative systems on a more extensive scale. Options in
contrast to traditional courts are The Online courts where the appointed
jury is present in the court yet the legal advisor or prosecutor isn't. This is
the current course of action, except that, now the court is the private office
of the appointed jury, because of the lockdown. Also, the Virtual courts
where there is no appointed jury, legal counsellor or prosecutor and a
computer take decision dependent on the inputs of the defendant.
Therefore to conclude, the coronavirus emergency has empowered courts all
over the world to discover inventive methods of conveying justice. Courts
and their clients must ‘hold onto the occasion’. We critically need a lot of
new laws and procedural principles for the online courts. We need to make
more mindfulness and understanding and make stages and spaces that
welcome and empower lawmakers to meet up, exchange, and work together
to come out with the potential solutions. We should embrace innovation and
new media to make a citizen’s movement by endowing them with the
information, assets, and tools to squeeze the framework to change. The
quickly advancing field of "lawful tech" empowers us to utilize rising
innovations like digitization, process robotization, data and analytics,
Artificial Intelligence to reconsider the working of the citizen-driven legal
system in the 21st century
Authored by
Sibtain Kadri