Supreme Court schedules re-hearings for 168 resolved cases

Re-hearings have been scheduled for more than a hundred cases just a few months after the chief justice said it was unconstitutional for judges to write verdicts once they retire.

The Supreme Court’s cause list for Monday shows that 106 of these cases will be heard by an appellate bench headed by Chief Justice Surendra Kumar Sinha himself.

Another bench headed by Justice Md Abdul Wahhab Miah will hear an extra 60 cases.

“Altogether, 168 cases that had been disposed of have come up for re-hearing,” Sinha’s Personal Secretary Md Anisur Rahman told bdnews24.com.

“Retired Justice AHM Shamsuddin Choudhury was in the bench that heard 161 of these cases. Former chief justice Md Muzammel Hossain was part of the bench that saw the seven other cases,” said an official of the apex court, seeking anonymity.   

He also said only the summary judgments on these cases, not the full verdicts, have been published.

Justice Hossain, the 21st chief justice of Bangladesh, retired in last year's January, and Justice Choudhury in October.

The cases to be re-heard had their judgments issued from 2013 until the retirement of these two judges, court officials said.

Justice Choudhury said in an Ekattor TV show at night that the Supreme Court’s move to re-hear the cases is ‘unprecedented’ and ‘ridiculous’.

The former judge also said it would only ‘waste the court’s valuable time’.

Justice Choudhury had submitted the verdicts and orders he had written after going into retirement in February amid a huge debate over Chief Justice Sinha’s remark on writing verdicts after retirement.

The chief justice was criticised by Awami League MP Suranjit Sengupta who claimed the remark threw out in the open his ‘rivalry’ with Justice Choudhury.

The Appellate Division, in its full verdict on a case, observed that a judge must avoid delays in writing full verdict, which should not exceed six months even in exceptional cases.