Cuttack, July 12: Serving premature retirement order to a sitting Judge with no sufficient ground is punitive and violation of Natural Justice, said the Orissa High Court on Friday.
Hearing pleas of a District Judge, identified as Sanjaya Kumar Sahu who was served compusury retirement order at 55, a division bench of the Orissa High Court set aside the premature retirement of the senior judicial officer.
The division bench comprising Justices Dixit Krishna Shripad and Mruganka Sekhar Sahoo admitted the petition, observing that the retirement order was procedurally flawed and substantively unjustified.
Thus, the bench ordered that the matter be reconsidered afresh by the competent authority i.e to the Jurisdictional review committee.
According to the prima facie of the case, Sahoo joined the judicial service in 1997 as an Additional Civil Judge (Junior Division)-cum-Judicial Magistrate Second Class.
He was then posted as the presiding officer of the Family Court in Nabarangpur when the state government issued a notification on March 11, 2022, directing his premature retirement.
The Court observed that Sahoo was not given due opportunity to present his case before the decision was made.
On the other hand, the Odisha government pleaded that Sahoo had a disciplinary proceeding from 2007, a complaint from a night watchman alleging caste-based slurs, and a boycott by the district bar association over alleged unruly behaviour and failure to issue cause lists.
However, the High Court ruled that the allegations had either been dropped after due inquiry or did not result in any punitive findings since he was normally promoted in due course of time in 2021.
The bench observed that a judicial officer who had cleared the rigorous judicial scrutiny at age 50 could not be suddenly declared unfit for service without sufficient materials summing his discrepancies.
Accordingly, the court quashed the March 2022 notification and remitted the matter back to the jurisdictional review committee for a fresh decision.
