Justice Goda Raghuram appointed Director of National Judicial Academy
JUSTICE Goda Raghuram, former President of CESTAT has been appointed as the Director of the National Judicial Academy at Bhopal. The Judicial Academy has the legal mandate of strengthening the administration of justice through judicial education, research and policy development. The Mission is knowledge for justice. It is widely acknowledged to be the best judicial education campus in the world.The post has been lying vacant for nearly two years. But at last, they have found the most correct person to lead the academy. A journalist who was not exactly in the best of terms with Justice Raghuram when he was President of CESTAT told me, "we don't need such scholars in CESTAT, he should be in the National Judicial Academy." Even an adversary cannot help admiring his erudition. He is a scholar with deep understanding of law, command of language and clarity in thought and expression. During his three years in CESTAT, he acquired an enviable mastery of the tax subjects that perhaps nobody else in the country understood service tax as he did.
There has been a lot of appreciative discussion recently about the Madras High Court Judgement on Press freedom, but Justice Goda Raghuram had ten years ago delivered a spectacular judgement in the case of the famous movie "The Da Vinci Code".
In this judgement, he said:
We enjoy a shared membership of the human race and our future depends on tolerance of distinctions that mark the richness and diversity of the plural global community of man. Faith, race, religion, dogma or culture are not wholly homogeneous attributes. There are several clear subtle and evolving variations within the same general milieu.
Freedom of speech and expression significantly contributes to a liberal open-minded civil society; rational, tolerant and accommodating plurality - what this freedom means and in the Indian constitutional context, is yet again in issue in this case.
The right to communicate and receive ideas, facts, knowledge, information, beliefs, theories, creative and emotive impulses by speech or by written word, drama, theatre, dance, music, film, through a news paper, magazine or book is an essential component of the protected right and may be exercised untrammeled by unreasonable Governmental restraint.
Dan Brown, the author of "The Da Vinci Code" was so impressed that he presented an autographed copy of the book to him with the remarks, "with my sincere gratitude for your wisdom".
I had the experience of chaperoning him for two days recently and I was simply swept away in the avalanche of knowledge that effortlessly slid from him.
All the best to Justice Goda Raghuram in his new assignment. We hope the National Judicial Academy under his leadership will be able to provide guidance the CESTAT Members and Departmental Representatives.
Addressing a conference in the National Judicial Academy a few months ago, Justice Raghuram said, when some body comes to you to seek justice, you must deliver justice.