On Thursday, Justice K V Viswanathan of the Supreme Court decided not to take part in the coal scam cases because he had previously worked on one of the cases as a lawyer. These cases involve requests to change earlier Supreme Court rulings that stopped high courts from hearing appeals about criminal cases linked to illegal coal block allocations.
Chief Justice Sanjiv Khanna, who leads the group of judges, said they will create a new three-judge team to handle these cases starting the week of February 10, 2025. The judges talked about the rules for appeals and whether high courts can hear certain cases or not. They also asked the court’s registry to gather all ongoing petitions about two important judgments made in 2014 and 2017 that restricted high courts from taking these cases.
Justice Viswanathan stated that he was involved in a case related to Common Cause, the NGO that filed the public interest litigation (PIL) in the coal scam issue. In 2014, the Supreme Court canceled 214 coal block allocations that the government made between 1993 and 2010 after reviewing the PILs.
The court ordered a trial to be conducted by a special CBI judge and said that any request to pause the trial or affect the investigation could only be made directly to the Supreme Court, which means other courts cannot hear such requests.
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