The Madras High Court has created a mechanism to comply with the Supreme Court diktat that an interim stay of civil or criminal proceedings before the trial courts will get expired automatically after six months, unless such stay is extended by the High Court by way of a speaking order.
In a circular issued to the Registry, the High Court’s Registrar-General, P. Dhanabal, instructed the officers as well as the staff concerned to list all pending stay petitions, in which relief had already been granted, once in six months, so that the judge concerned could pass appropriate orders.
Making it clear that the interim stay petitions must be listed promptly and without fail, the R-G said the counsel on record would also be at liberty to bring the issue to the notice of the portfolio judge concerned if such interim stay petitions do not get listed once in six months.
“The above circular shall be scrupulously followed by all concerned,” the R-G said, and referred to a verdict delivered by a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court in Asian Resurfacing of Road Agency Private Limited versus Central Bureau of Investigation on March 28, 2018.
In that decision, the top court had expressed grave concern over civil and criminal proceedings, including corruption cases, getting held up in trial courts for years together because of the stay granted by the High Courts. It took note of the proceedings getting adjourned sine die on account of the stay.
Even after the stay gets vacated by the High Courts, the trial courts do not take up the cases due to lack of intimation. In an attempt to remedy this situation, the Supreme Court had ordered that all interim stay orders passed by the High Court would get expired automatically after six months unless they had been extended.
The top court also made it mandatory for the High Courts to pass speaking orders while extending the stay and explain how the case was of such exceptional nature that continuing the stay was more important than having the trial finalised. The trial courts were also directed to proceed if an extension order was not produced.
Despite such categorical directive issued in 2018, the Supreme Court on July 2, 2021 came across an instance of a trial court in Dehradun not having commenced trial even after the expiry of six months since an interim stay was granted.
