CHENNAI: At least 1,626 contempt petitions against the State government officials are pending before the Madras High Court and a majority – 1,247 – related to disobedience of orders passed by judges who demitted office.
The huge pendency of contempt cases, which relate to defiance of orders passed by the courts, came to light when the High Court’s registry recently made the submission before the first bench of the court during a PIL hearing.
The first bench, consisting of Chief Justice S K Kaul and R Mahadevan, has now directed the court’s registry to place the contempt petitions on order passed by judges who had demitted the office be placing before either of the judges every Friday at 2.15 pm.
Following the order, it is learnt that the state government has now asked its various departments to submit a list of pending contempt cases filed before the principal bench and the Madurai Bench of the
High Court.
The registry’s submission pointed out that approximately 1,447 contempt petitions are pending before the single bench and 179 cases relate to Division Bench. As per figures available with the Madras High Court Registry, of the nearly 1447 pending cases, 1,247 cases pertain to orders passed by judges who have demitted office while 200 are other cases.
The state government has asked the departments to enclose a list of cases which have been reported as orders complied with or stay obtained either in appeal and in the review.
The officials have been asked to send the compliance order in triplicate with each contempt petition to the office of the government pleader of the Madras High court with a copy marked to the government and public Court Case Monitoring System (CCMS), an IT application platform which monitors cases pending against the departments or officials concerned.