Very High Standard Of Professionalism & Legal Acumen Expected From Designated Senior Advocates: Supreme Court
|The Supreme Court said that very high standard of professionalism and legal acumen is expected from the designated Senior Advocates appearing before it.
The Court was deciding a PMLA (Prevention of Money Laundering) case in which a woman being the Deputy Secretary in the office of the Chief Minister, Chhattisgarh was arrested and remanded to Enforcement Directorate (ED) custody. She had filed an appeal against the order of the Chhattisgarh High Court which had dismissed her bail application under Section 439 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC).
The two-Judge Bench comprising Justice Aniruddha Bose and Justice Bela M. Trivedi observed, “It cannot be gainsaid that every party approaching the court seeking justice is expected to make full and correct disclosure of material facts and that every advocate being an officer of the court, though appearing for a particular party, is expected to assist the court fairly in carrying out its function to administer the justice. It hardly needs to be emphasized that a very high standard of professionalism and legal acumen is expected from the advocates particularly designated Senior advocates appearing in the highest court of the country so that their professionalism may be followed and emulated by the advocates practicing in the High Courts and the District Courts.”
The Bench said that, though it is true that the advocates would settle the pleadings and argue in the courts on instructions given by their clients, however their duty to diligently verify the facts from the record of the case, using their legal acumen for which they are engaged, cannot be obliviated.
Senior Advocate Siddharth Aggarwal appeared for the appellant/accused while ASG S.V. Raju appeared for the respondent/ED.
In this case, the appellant i.e., the accused was arrested and the Special Court rejected her bail application and hence, she filed the same before the High Court. However, the High Court also rejected her application and the complainant filed a protest petition under Section 173(8) of the CrPC against the final report of the State Police praying for the completion of the investigation of offences. The accused being aggrieved by the order of the High Court, preferred the appeal before the Apex Court under Article 136 of the Constitution.
In the appeal, though the documents, particularly the Chargesheet and the Cognizance order were neither part of pleadings nor were produced during the course of arguments before the High Court, the Certificate at the end of the SLP (Special Leave Petition) was given by the Advocate-on-Record appearing for the appellant without verifying the facts. Though the said Chargesheet and the Cognizance order were neither pleaded nor argued before the High Court, an impudent attempt was sought to be made by alleging all throughout in the synopsis, list of dates, questions of law and the grounds in the SLP that the High Court had grossly erred in not appreciating the said documents.
The Supreme Court in the above regard noted, “… the Court has a reason to believe that there was a bold attempt made by and on behalf of the appellant to misrepresent the facts for challenging the impugned order. … The Certificate to be issued by the Advocate-on-Record and the Affidavit to be filed by or on behalf of the petitioner/appellant at the end of the SLP as per the provisions contained in the Supreme Court Rules, do carry sanctity in the eyes of law.”
The Court added that it is unbelievable that the battery of lawyers appearing for the appellant did not notice the apparent fact that when the chargesheet and cognizance order were not in existence before the High Court when the arguments were concluded and the judgment was reserved, non-consideration of the same by the High Court could not be made the basis for challenging the said order in the SLP before the Supreme Court.
“In the instant case, though the Court had specifically drawn the attention of all the learned counsels appearing for the appellant with regard to the ex-facie inconsistencies appearing in the grounds mentioned in the SLP and in the certificate and affidavit filed at the bottom of the SLP, as per the order dated 09.10.2023, again an attempt was sought to be made by filing a smartly drafted affidavit, avoiding to answer the query raised by the court. Such an attempt made by and on behalf of the appellant is strongly deprecated. As such, the appeal deserves to be dismissed on that ground alone”, said the Court.
However, the Court agreed to deal with the appeal independently and on merits, since the counsels for parties made their submissions at length.
Accordingly, the Apex Court dismissed the appeal and imposed a cost of Rs. 1 lakh on the appellant for misrepresentation of facts in the appeal.
Cause Title- Saumya Chaurasia v. Directorate of Enforcement (Neutral Citation: 2023 INSC 1073)
Appearance:
Appellant: Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal, AOR Malak Manish Bhatt, Advocates Arshdeep Singh Khurana, Harshwardhan Parganiha, Neeha Nagpal, Aditya Chopra, Mandeep Singh, Harsh Srivastava, Arshiya Ghose, and Sidak Anand.
Respondent: AOR Mukesh Kumar Maroria, Advocates Zoheb Hossain, Annam Venkatesh, Sairica Raju, Chandra Prakash, Arkaj Kumar, Vivek, Manisha Dubey, Ankit Bhatia, Hitarth Raja, Agrimaa Singh, Kshitiz Aggarwal, Harsh Paul Singh, Samrat Goswami, Bhavini Srivastava, Vinayak Sharma, Gaurav Sarkar, and Sonali Sharma.