Delhi HC issues directions for objectivity in ACR grading of judicial officers

The Delhi High Court has issued certain directions in an attempt to introduce greater uniformity, objectivity and some measure of transparency and predictability in the Annual Confidential Report (ACR) grading of judicial officers.

The performance of judicial officers is supervised and graded by committees comprising three High Court judges. Each committee is assigned about 25-30 judicial officers. These ACR gradings, which are based on appraisal of disposal figures and judgments of the concerned judges, are then considered by the Full Court, which can endorse or modify these gradings.

This system aims to eliminate any form of bias or partisanship, as it is based on the theory that one individual High Court judge should not decide the career or fate of any given judicial officer.

Some of these directions by the High Court are as follows:

1. The concerned judicial officer should be awarded marks/points for a maximum of 100. This score should accordingly reflect the officer’s performance on certain parameters such as quality of judgments, institution/disposal ratio, total number of final judgments delivered in contested matters, timeliness, promptness in delivery of judgments, disposal of old cases, not taking leave or clubbing leave with vacations, and on the basis of interaction/ inspection.
2. Some allowance may be given wherever the judicial officer is assigned burdensome administrative tasks, such as membership of committees, co-ordination for events, conducting disciplinary enquiries if any of staff, etc. Similarly, judicial officers handling CBI courts, or other jurisdictions which have their special characteristics, must be evaluated on separate criteria.
3. To eliminate unconscious bias, no officer should ordinarily be subject to appraisal by any one judge or committee for more than two consecutive years.
4. Instructions may be issued requesting all appraising judges/committees to forward instances of outstanding judgments and extremely poor judgments of any given judicial officer to the concerned inspecting High Court judge/committee for due consideration and input for the ACR appraisal of that judicial officer.

The directions were passed by a Division Bench of Justices S Ravindra Bhat and Sunil Gaur in a writ petition by a senior Delhi Higher Judicial service officer.

The petitioner alleged violation of her fundamental right to equality before law by the adoption of a resolution by the Full Court of the Delhi High Court on April 28,2009. This resolution had evolved a new criteria for appointment to the position of District and Sessions Judge, and required every eligible officer to have been awarded ‘A’ grade in their ACR for the previous five years.

The petitioner had raised two issues before the High Court. First, that no new norm or criteria should have been evolved and implemented without prior notice, and second, that she should have been made aware of her ACR gradings as well as those of her juniors to enable her to correct herself and improve her performance.

Both these the contentions made by the petitioners were rejected by the Court.

The Court shot down the argument that had an officer known the highest or a better grading is essential, she would have performed better. The performance of every judge is expected to be her or his best, the Court held.

It observed that,

“In a sense, service in the judicial department (though a public service) is a mission, given the solemn nature of judging. If this is the assumption on which every judge, at every level is appointed to the judicial system, the argument that if one is made aware that a higher threshold of performance is expected, she or he would work better (or have worked better) cannot be countenanced…

…An incumbent cannot be heard to say that her judicial work was not up to the mark, because she was involved in some other duties or more importantly, she was not aware that best performance would result in selection as District Judge.”

The second submission was rejected on the ground that the method of appraisal of judicial officers is such that gradings given to each individual are treated as confidential. Hence, it was not permissible to publicize the gradings of all judicial officers.

The Delhi High Court, which was one of the respondents in the matter, was represented through Advocates Sanjoy Ghose, Rishabh Jaitley and Dhananjay Rana. 

The Government of NCT of Delhi was represented through Advocates Anuj Aggarwal and Deboshree Mukherjee.

The petitioner was represented through Advocate Sanjay Jain.

Read judgement below: