The Difficulty of Equal Justice

Justice Madan B Lokur is a Former Judge of the Supreme Court of India and as Chief Justice of the Guahati High Court and High Court of Andhra Pradesh. He is currently a judge of the non-resident panel of the Supreme Court of Fiji. Justice Lokur served as Standing Counsel for the Central Government for six years and then as Additional Solicitor General of India until his elevation as an Additional Judge of Delhi High Court on 19th February, 1999.  He was appointed as Permanent Judge on 5th July, 1999. He functioned as the Acting Chief Justice of the Delhi High Court from 13th February, 2010 to 21st May, 2010; as Chief Justice of Gauhati High Court from 24th June, 2010 to 14th November, 2011 and Chief Justice of High Court of Andhra Pradesh from 15th November, 2011 to 3rd June, 2012. He was appointed as Judge of the Supreme Court of India on 4th June, 2012. He was a member of the Mediation & Conciliation Project Committee of the Supreme Court of India since its inception in 2005 and judge in charge of the E-Committee of the Supreme Court of India. He was also appointed as a single member Committee to suggest improvements in the working of the Homes and organization under the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection and Children) Act, 2000 and the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Rules, 2007. He retired from the Supreme Court of India on 30th December, 2018.

Professor Vijay Raghavan is a Professor with the Centre for Criminology and Justice (CCJ), School of Social Work, TISS, and has been working with the Centre since 2005. Prior to this, since 1990, he was Project Director of Prayas: Social Work in Criminal Justice, a field action project of the CCJ, engaging with issues of protection of legal rights and social re-entry of criminal justice clients, with a special focus on women, children and youth. He continues to work with Prayas as faculty-in-charge. His primary research interests include access to justice and prison reforms, social work practice in criminal justice, human trafficking, youth offender studies, rehabilitation of custodial populations, homelessness and penalisation of poverty, and implementation of correctional laws. He teaches courses on ‘Criminology: Trends and Perspectives’ and ‘Contemporary Debates in Criminal Justice’. He was a Member of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Prisoners; Advisory Committee on Prevention of Immoral Trafficking; Committee on Prevention of Atrocities against Women and Law (2011-14); Justice Radhakrishnan Committee on Prison Reforms, Maharashtra (2017-18); Advisory Committee on Prison Reforms and Correctional Administration, Bureau of Police Research and Development, Ministry of Home Affairs, GOI; and Prison Training Manual Drafting Committee (2016-17), Bureau of Police Research and Development, Ministry of Home Affairs, GOI. He is also a Vice Chair of the Indian Society of Criminology.

Dr. Anup Surendranath is the Executive Director of Project 39A (formerly the Centre on the Death Penalty) and an Assistant Professor of Law at National Law University, Delhi. He was invited by Chief Justice R.M. Lodha (as he then was) in May 2014 to serve as the Deputy Registrar (Research) in the Supreme Court and was on deputation to the Supreme Court until August 2015, the last such appointment having been made in the late 80s. Dr. Surendranath completed his M.Phil in Law (Distinction) at the University of Oxford in May 2010, his BCL (Distinction) at the University of Oxford (July 2008) and his B.A., LL.B (Hons.) from NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad in June 2006. Dr. Surendranath was the Director of the Death Penalty Research Project (DPRP) at the National Law University, Delhi between June 2013 – May 2016. In a first of its kind in India, the DPRP resulting in the Death Penalty India Report (May 2016) interviewed all of India’s death row prisoners and their families towards developing a socio-economic profile and mapping their interaction with the criminal justice system. Dr. Surendranath has been consulted by the Law Commission of India and the UNOHCHR Geneva on the death penalty and has spoken extensively at domestic and international forums. In January 2018, Dr. Surendranath was appointed as a member of the Advisory Council at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights, University of Oxford.

Monica Sakhrani is Senior Advisor of the Fair Trial Fellowship in Maharashtra, of Project 39A, National Law University Delhi. She practiced for eighteen years in Bombay and Madras in the High Courts, criminal courts, labour and matrimonial courts handling civil, criminal, labour, matrimonial and constitutional cases. For eight years she was an Associate Professor at the Centre for Social Justice and Governance at the School of Social Work, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), teaching courses on ‘Engendering Law and Justice’, ‘Law Justice and Democratic Rights’ and ‘Feminist Legal Studies; Law and Social Work’. She has researched and written extensively on gender and human rights, criminal law, domestic violence, sexual harassment and other allied issues.