Andhra Pradesh High Court Chief Justice and High Court Legal Services Committee (HCLSC) Patron-in-Chief Prashant Kumar Mishra has called upon the legal fraternity to render their services to the needy in villages, particularly women and children, farmers, senior citizens, workers in the unorganised sector, transgenders and victims of trafficking and COVID-19.
“We should strive to make villages litigation-free. The very purpose of our existence is to help those who don’t have access to justice,” he said.
Launching ‘Mission Legal Services’ (MLS) under which the HCLSC will adopt villages with the cooperation of law colleges, stakeholders of other legal service institutions and village heads, from the High Court on the occasion of National Legal Services Day on Tuesday, the Chief Justice said that every village should be covered by the outreach programme so that deprived sections would be able to get justice.
He said the HCLSC would constitute core, legal literacy, legal aid, conciliation, redressal and coordination committees for achieving the objectives of the MLS, which was a pan-India programme aimed at reaching out to those who could not access the various avenues for justice.
Justices A.V. Sesha Sai and Ahsanuddin Amanullah, Chairman and Executive Chairman of the HCLSC respectively, stressed the need for paralegal volunteers and others who would be reaching out to villages to facilitate justice delivery through appropriate forums. The committees would act as bridges between those seeking justice and the judiciary, they said.
The judges of the High Court, HCLSC secretary M.V. Ramana Kumari, State Legal Services Authority member-secretary Chinnamsetty Raju, High Court Bar Association president K. Janakirami Reddy and the principals of Velagapudi Durgamba Siddhartha Law College (Vijayawada), A.C. College of Law (Guntur) and VIT-AP School of Law were among those present.
Later, Mr. Mishra flagged off a vehicle which will take law students and paralegal volunteers to villages under the MLS.
