The Congress on Friday supported the request of High Court Chief Justice Geeta Mittal to the Centre to set up two benches of the Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) in Jammu and Srinagar .
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A spokesman of the J&K Pradesh Congress Committee said his party has fully supported the genuine concerns echoed by the Chief Justice to set up permanent multiple benches, with permanent seats in Jammu and Srinagar.
"What was expected from the government and public representatives to be highlighted was advocated by Ms. Mittal," J&K Congress chief spokesperson Ravinder Sharma said.
"It's most unfortunate that those who were required to apply their minds on the issue and think before they act, keeping in view the bare facts and figures and the relevant data, have utterly failed in their duty and put the litigants and lawyers to great hardships by their unthoughtful, arbitrary and unilateral decisions," Mr. Sharma said.
The Congress said the letter of the Chief Justice has put the entire matter in right perspective. Till the needful is done, the notification of shifting of cases and the jurisdiction of high court, be kept in abeyance, the party demanded.
Chief Justice Ms. Mittal recently wrote a letter to Dr. Jitendra Singh, Union Minister of State, and stressed on establishing of CAT with multiple benches, with permanent seats at Jammu and Srinagar.
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"With the enforcement of J&K Re-organization Act, 2019, some 31,641 pending service matters have to be transferred from both the wings of the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir to the administrative tribunals and in absence of any infrastructure or registry for operationalising the functioning of the Tribunal in J&K and only a single circuit bench of the Chandigarh Bench of the Tribunal would be hopelessly insufficient to provide efficacious dispensation to the disputants in service matters in the Union Territory of J&K as well as in Ladakh," the letter reads.
She pointed out that pendency of the service matters before the Jammu or the Srinagar Wing of the J&K High Court is more than the pendency before the Principal Bench at Delhi and way more than that before the Administrative Tribunals at Allahabad, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Jabalpur etc.
