The Supreme Court will hear tomorrow a public interest petition requesting it to make public the report of a high-level committee that probed allegations of sexual misconduct against three judges of the Karnataka high court in February 2003.
The committee comprised Chief Justice C K Thakkar of the Bombay high court, Chief Justice G L Gupta of the Kerala high court, and Justice A K Patnaik, a senior judge of the Orissa high court.
The high-level committee was set up on the basis of a report sent by Chief Justice N K Jain of the Karnataka high court, who had conducted the preliminary enquiry into the allegations.
The committee had summoned the three judges -- Justice N S Veerabhadraiah, Justice Chandrasekhariah and Justice V Gopala Gowda -- in the couse of its investigation into their reported misbehaviour in a resort near Mysore.
The committee eventually gave all three judges a clean chit in a voluminous report submitted to Chief Justice of India V N Khare, saying it had found no evidence against them after probing the charges for two months.
Indira Jaising, senior lawyer and petitioner, told rediff.com, "If a judge is found to be corrupt, the public has the right to know. And if he is not, let the public know about it as well. How the tainted judge was investigated and what methods were used to investigate the charges should also be made public. For the sake of transparency of the judiciary and to maintain accountability, I am pleading with the court to make the Mysore resort scandal report public."
Jaising's case will be argued by former Union law minister Shanti Bhushan.