Nearly 10,000 lawyers of the Patna High Court on Friday abstained from work to protest against the November two blasts at courts in Uttar Pradesh that left several people, including advocates, dead and injured.

The strike was called by the Coordination Committee of the three associations of the advocates, the convenor of the protest Yogesh Chandra Verma said.

In India, a city court in Delhi has sentenced 19 lawyers to six months of rigorous imprisonment for not abiding by a high court directive to not go on strike.

On Friday, a magistrate pronounced the lawyers guilty and sentenced them to a maximum punishment of six months.

In 2005, the Delhi High Court charged the lawyers under an unlawful assembly law, for holding a massive strike over their relocation to a new district court.

The 19 lawyers are currently free on bail while awaiting an appeal.

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Supreme Court lawyers Wednesday condemned the terror bombings in the court premises of three Uttar Pradesh towns as an 'attack on temples of justice'.

The lawyers organised a daylong sit-in before the apex court though they did not interfere with the normal functioning of the court.

'Friday's terrorist attacks in Lucknow, Faizabad, and Varanasi, in which several lawyers, litigants, stamp vendors and other innocent people were killed, are a heinous crime against humanity,' said Supreme Court Bar Association president P.H. Parekh.

The Supreme Court Bar Association (SCBA), the All-India Bar Association (AIBA) and the Bar Council of India have condemned the bomb blasts in Faizabad, Varanasi and Lucknow courts on November 23.

They urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Home Minister Shivraj Patil to order tightening of security in all courts of the country. They sought Chief Justice of India K.G. Balakrishnan’s intervention in this regard.
“Protest day”

The move by the Bar Council of India (BCI) to allow lawyers to launch web sites with the approval of the respective State Bar Councils have evoked mixed reaction from the members of the Trivandrum Bar Association.

Influential lobby groups, business houses have taken up the issue with various govt arms.

Industry is seriously concerned that the new Competition Act, passed by Parliament in September but not yet fully notified, could impact local and cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and curtail business activities by placing substantial discretionary powers in the hands of the thinly-staffed Competition Commission of India (CCI).

The AIDS Bill was passed two years back. And since then many Parliament sessions have taken place but the bill has yet to see the light of the day.

‘I don’t know what is the delay about. The government hardly cares,” says an HIV positive patient, Raju Nagar.

Thirty-seven-year-old Raju is a worried man. Being an HIV positive and like the 2.5 million odd HIV patients in India, he has been waiting for the AIDS Bill to be introduced in the Parliament.

But it has been more than two years now and there is no sign of the Bill.

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New Delhi, Jul 12: The Supreme Court today set up a a two-member panel headed by a former judge of the apex court to examine the maladies afflicting the public distribution system (PDS) in the country and suggest remedial measures.

A Bench of Justice Arijit Pasayat and Justice S H Kapadia, which asked the committee to submit a report to it in four months, observed that it was an accepted fact that there was widespread corruption in the PDS and the foodgrain was not reaching the common man.

NEW DELHI: Chief Justice K G Balakrishnan has worked out a figure of additional judges that would be required to clear the judicial backlog. According to him, if 1,539 new judges were added to the existing 792, all pending cases in high courts would be cleared in a year. And if they are to be cleared in two years, 770 additional high court judges would be sufficient.

NEW DELHI: In an instance of the law taking its own time to catch up with prevalent social norms, the Supreme Court last week said, “there is nothing wrong in a girl eloping to get married according to her choice if she has attained 18 years the legal age for marriage.”

Nothing wrong with that, barring for one small thing: Once a girl is 18, she automatically attains legal sanction to get married. So whether she elopes for matrimony or chooses a partner to live in with, it comes to the same thing.