Access To The Courts


 
 
Concept Explanation
 

Access To The Courts

Access to the Courts:

Does Everyone Have Access To The Courts? In principal, all citizens of India can access the courts in this country.

  • This implies that every citizen a right to justice through the courts. The courts play a very significant role in protecting our fundamental rights. if any citizen believes that their rights are being violated, then they can approach the court for justice to be done. While the court are available for all, in reality access to courts has always been difficult for a vast majority of the poor in India, legal procedures involve a lot of money and paperwork as well as take up a lot of time.
  • For a poor person who cannot read and whose family depends on a daily wage, the idea of going to court to get justice often seems remote. In response to this, the Supreme Court in the early 1980s devised a mechanism of public interest litigation or PIL to increase access to justice.
  • It allowed any individual or organization to file a PIL in the high court or the Supreme Court on behalf of those whose rights were being violated. The legal process was greatly simplified and even a letter or telegram addressed to the Supreme Court or the high court could be treated as a PIL. For the common person, access to courts is access to justice.
  • The courts exercise a crucial role in interpreting the fundamental rights of citizens. Another issue that affects the common person’s access to justice is the inordinately long number of years that courts take to hear a case. The phrase ‘justice delayed is justice denied’ is often used to characterize this extended time period that courts take. However, in spite of this there is no denying that the judiciary has played a crucial role in democratic India, serving as a check on the powers of the executive and the legislature as well as in protecting the fundamental rights of citizens.
  • The members of the constituent assembly had quite correctly envisioned a system of courts with an independent judiciary as a key feature of our democracy.  
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