BENGALURU: The newly appointed Chief Justice of Karnataka High Court Abhay Shreeniwas Oka was welcomed by the members of Bar Council on Monday. The occasion commenced with a welcome speech rendered by the chairman of Karnataka State Bar Council Naik K B. Speaking at the occasion, Justice Oka said, “I believe that the judicial institution which includes judges, members of the Bar and staff members are the three stakeholders and are answerable to the public who are consumer of justice”.
Mentioning that the state provides huge funds to the judiciary, he said: “We are accountable to the litigants. The accountability has to balanced with judicial independence... It is the utmost duty of the judges and members of the Bar to ensure that the common man gets justice as assured by the Constitution.”
“I always believed that members of the Bar have a right to legitimate demands. It is their duty to ensure that functioning of courts are not affected in any manner. We the judges and members of the Bar must be ready to suffer inconvenience for the purposes of rendering service and providing quality justice to the common man,” he said.
Comparing the infrastructure provided to trial courts in Karnataka with the same in other states, Justice Oka said the trial courts in Karnataka have good infrastructure. “I believed that our state has the potential to provide best infrastructure to trial courts. We should endeavour to achieve that we strengthen our trial courts. This should be our first priority.”
Stressing the need of digitalisation of court records and computerisation for the sake of transparency and improving the efficiency, the Justice Oka said: “We should encourage the video conferencing in our day to day functioning. We will have to use modern technology for improving our efficiency. We are duty-bound to respect and uphold Constitutional values such as secularism and democracy. There cannot be a rule of law unless we have our independent judiciary. It is our duty to maintain the independence of judiciary at any cost. It is a basic structure of the Constitution. We can do so only if all the stakeholders remain united and committed to the cause of justice.”