Team  SoOLEGAL

Court has the power to permit any person who is not a lawyer to put forth his submissions before a court whenever called for by the court: Madras HC

Team SoOLEGAL 10 Jan 2019 12:30pm

Court has the power to permit any person who is not a lawyer to put forth his submissions before a court whenever called for by the court: Madras HC

The Madras High Court while upholding Magistrate's order rejecting remand of Nakkeeran Gopal, observed that there was nothing wrong in calling upon senior journalist N Ram to get his opinion.

During the hearing of Nakkeeran case, the Magistrate had called upon senior journalist and former editor-in-chief of The Hindu N Ram, who was standing in the middle of advocates and others in the court, to give his opinion as to whether the provision under Section 124 of IPC was applied against any publication in the past. His submissions were recorded by the Magistrate in the order

Special Public Prosecutor, submitted before the high court that Magistrate was influenced by inessential deliberations while considering the remand of the accused. He resisted that N Ram did not have the capacity to make his submissions before the court and he was a rank outsider A Ramesh as the present proceedings are concerned.

 Justice Anand Venkatesh had observed in November that court proceedings should revolve around law and facts of the case while
tasking the magistrate to file a report on why and under what provisions of law he allowed, N Ram to make submissions in the case.

The Magistrate S Gopinathan in his report to the Madras HC detailed that he was under the bonafide consciousness that he is authorised to call for such opinion according to the of provisions available under Section 32 of the Advocates Act, 1961 and Rule 69 of the Criminal Rules of practice.

 By taking consideration of the Magistrate’s report and also referring to Section 32 of the Advocates Act Justice N Anand Venkatesh observed that “The court has the power to permit any person not enrolled as an advocate to put forth his submissions before a court whenever called for by the court.” 

Justice Venkatesh further added that “It is clear from the judgment of the Apex Court that with the prior permission of the court, the magistrate can permit any person to speak in the court. In this case, the court was dealing with a very peculiar case where a publication had been made a subject matter of an offence under Section 124 of the IPC, which is unprecedented and which came up for the first time before the court,”

Therefore, the Magistrate wanted to get the stances of a Senior journalist as to whether there are any such cases in the past.

N Ram gave response to this uncertainty by touching upon the freedom of the press, adding that the court did not find anything wrong with the procedure adopted by the magistrate and the submissions made by Ram.



Tagged: N Ram   Madras High Court   Justice Anand Venkatesh   Nakkeeran Gopal   The Hindu   Apex Court   Advocates Act   1961   Criminal Rules of practice   IPC     
Did you find this write up useful? YES 11 NO 0
×

C2RMTo Know More

Something Awesome Is In The Work

0

DAYS

0

HOURS

0

MINUTES

0

SECONDS

Sign-up and we will notify you of our launch.
We’ll also give some discount for your effort :)

* We won’t use your email for spam, just to notify you of our launch.
×

SAARTHTo Know More

Launching Soon : SAARTH, your complete client, case, practise & document management SAAS application with direct client chat feature.

If you want to know more give us a Call at :+91 98109 29455 or Mail info@soolegal.com