chakravarthy

The state performed its duty of protection of society and the individual through coercive enforcement of the standards of justice based on the concept of ' Dharma '. From the Vedic period onward, the perennial attitude of Indian culture had been justice and righteousness. Justice, in the Indian context, was a human expression of a wider universal principle of nature and if men were entirely true to nature, their actions would be spontaneously just. Men experienced Justice, in the sense of a distributive equity, as moral justice, social justice, and legal justice. Each of these forms of justice was viewed as a particularisation of the general principle of the universe seen as a total organism. Impartial administration of justice was always regarded as one of the main duties of the King and he was considered to be the fountain of justice. The ethical code of society and its cultural standards were inter-related. The cultural maturity and social amicability and even their det...

The concept and doctrine of Principles of Natural Justice and its application in Justice delivery system is not new. It seems to be as old as the system of dispensation of justice itself. It has by now assumed the importance of being, so to say, "an essential inbuilt component" of the mechanism, through which decision making process passes, in the matters touching the rights and liberty of the people. It is no doubt, a procedural requirement but it ensures a strong safeguard against any Judicial or administrative order or action, adversely affecting the substantive rights of the individuals. 'Natural Justice' is an expression of English common law. In one of the English decisions, reported in Local Government Board v. Arlidge , (1915) AC 120 (138) HL, Viscount Haldane observed, "...those whose duty it is to decide must act judicially. They must deal with the question referred to them without bias and they must give to each of the parties the opportunity of a...

Judging from media reports, India has a BIG problem with rape. No other country seems to come even close. All over the globe "another rape in India" is reported ever so often. For example, in Germany on 27th December, 2013 the most popular TV news ended with "another gang rape in India". It was one of only five topics of the 15 minutes broadcast. Any person might have wondered how a gang rape in India made it to the main news in Germany. That same day in a conservative estimate, over a thousand rapes would have been committed all over the world. In the USA some 200, in South Africa some 170. In the western cities, the statistics show a high percentage, mush higher than in India. Many of those rapes would have been gang rapes. In many cases, the girl or woman would have been killed. Behind each of those statistical figures are painful, heartrending stories. If we knew what is happening at this very moment on this earth - how much pain humans inflict on other huma...