No one can be inflicted with an adverse order without first being given a “minimum opportunity” to be heard, the Supreme Court has said.
“If there is one constant lodestar that lights the judicial horizon in this country, it is this: No one can be inflicted with an adverse order without being afforded a minimum opportunity of hearing, and prior intimation of such a move,” a Bench of Justices Rohinton Nariman and S. Ravindra Bhat has held in the December 13 ruling.
The judgment by Justice Bhat said this principle “is too well entrenched in the legal ethos of this country to be ignored”.
It was based on an appeal filed by a pharmaceutical company, M/s Daffodills, against the decision of the Uttar Pradesh government to stop purchase of medicines for government hospitals from the company indefinitely. The company, which had won the tender, said the criminal case was not against the company but an erstwhile director, and it had nothing to do with it.
Justice Bhat said the decision not to buy medicines from the company indefinitely, that too on an assumption of complicity by Daffodills, was in violation of the principles of natural justice.
