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Regionalisation of Legal Education System and Judiciary in India
Context:
The Chief Justice of India, DY Chandrachud, advocated for legal education in regional languages to make legal knowledge accessible to citizens in their native tongues.
- He emphasised the need to create a new generation of lawyers proficient in their mother tongues to better argue in courts and promote justice.
State of Regionalisation of Legal System in India:
The above concept includes 2 aspects
- Use of Hindi /regional language on court premises in judgements, decrees, proceedings, etc.
- Presently, English remains the predominant language in India’s legal proceedings.
- Legal education in India generally refers to the education of lawyers before entry in practice.
- English is predominant in the country’s law universities; hence, there are suggestions that, like the Madhya Pradesh government’s decision to introduce Hindi instruction for the medical course, the legal education system can be regionalised in terms of language.
Need for regionalisation of the legal system:
- Access to Justice
- Language Barrier: Many Indians do not understand English, which is primarily used in the judiciary, creating a barrier to accessing justice due to difficulties in understanding legal proceedings, judgments, and their rights.
- Ease of Justice:
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- The Prime Minister at the All-India Conference of Law Ministers and Law Secretaries stressed the importance of drafting new laws in clear and regional languages to improve “ease of justice” for citizens.
Challenges in the regionalisation of language in India’s legal System:
- Judicial Uniformity: A common language is seen as essential in the Supreme Court and High Courts to prevent complications in cases involving different linguistic backgrounds.
- A recent example: Patna High Court dismissed a petition due to arguments being presented in Hindi.
- Implementation Barriers: The lack of legislative action and a structured framework for adopting regional languages in higher courts results in reliance on individual state decisions rather than a cohesive national policy.
- Cultural and Linguistic Diversity: India’s vast linguistic diversity complicates the establishment of a single regional language for legal proceedings in various states.
- Each state may have multiple languages, necessitating a tailored approach that respects local linguistic preferences.
- Infrastructure and Resources: Adequate infrastructure for translation and interpretation services is lacking, as is a shortage of trained personnel to facilitate these processes.
Initiatives taken to promote use of regional languages
- Supreme Court judgments are being translated into all Constitution-recognised languages, with 73,000 translations already available to the public.
- The Ministry of Law and Justice informed Parliament that the Artificial Intelligence Committee has developed two AI tools:
- SUVAS for translating judicial English documents into vernacular languages and vice-versa,
- SUPACE (Supreme Court Portal for Assistance in Court Efficiency) for legal research assistance.
- Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti: Under the Ministry of Law and Justice, the committee is working on developing a common vocabulary for legal terms across Indian languages, facilitating better translation and understanding of legal materials.
- The use of Hindi has been authorised long back in the judgments, decrees or orders in the High Courts of the States of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar.
- The Government of India had received proposals from the Government of Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal and Karnataka to permit use of Regional language in the proceedings of the High Court.
- The NEP 2020 recommends that legal education reflect socio-cultural contexts and encourages law institutions to offer bilingual education in English and the local language, making it more relevant and accessible to students from diverse linguistic backgrounds.
Constitutional Provisions
- Article 348(1) of the Constitution of India provides that all proceedings in the Supreme Court and in every High Court shall be in English language until Parliament by law otherwise provides.
- The 18th Law Commission of India, in its 216th Report (2008), recommended against making Hindi a compulsory language in the Supreme Court in the present societal context, a stance accepted by the government.
- Article 348(2) allows State Governors, with the President’s consent, to authorise the use of Hindi or any official state language in High Court proceedings but mandates that judgments, decrees, and orders be in English.
- The Official Language Act, 1963, reiterates this provision under Section 7.