Satya Prakash

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, February 5A Delhi-based lawyer has moved the Supreme Court seeking a direction to the Centre Government to create district-level branches of the Armed Forces Tribunal (AFT) for dispensing speedy justice to defence personnel who often have to wait for years for disposal of service matters.In her petition, advocate Kudrat Sandhu sought to highlight that Army men have to travel to AFT benches from far-flung areas to contest cases and pendency has gone up from 9,000 to 16,000 cases. She also requested the top court to direct the government to fill vacancies of judicial members in various benches of AFT at the earliest to make them properly functional.She submitted before a Bench headed by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar that the government should put in place the necessary mechanism for timely selection and appointment of the members of AFT Benches to ensure their effective and regular functioning.Sandhu wanted the government to take “appropriate legislative and administrative steps” for creating tribunals at the district headquarters with original jurisdiction over service matters of armed forces personnel and conferring appellate and revisional jurisdiction on AFTs.“What you are asking is a three-tier system on the lines of consumer courts,” the Bench commented on Friday while asking her to amend the petition accordingly.In her amended petition, she demanded that AFT orders should be allowed to be challenged before the high courts and power of civil contempt be conferred on AFTs.She said a clear-cut procedure should be prescribed for execution of orders or there should be some other coercive means available for implementation of the orders of the AFT and the proposed district-level tribunals and to place the AFT and the proposed district level tribunals under the Ministry of Law & Justice.Citing a letter written by AFT Bar Association Rajiv Manglik in September last year to the then CJI TS Thakur regarding the problems faced by defence personnel and their families due to non-appointment of judicial members of the AFT, the petitioner said quicker dispensation of justice in the AFT was a myth.