Quality legal aid should be provided to juveniles: CJ

Vijayawada: Justice Ramesh Ranganathan, acting Chief Justice of High Court of Judicature at Hyderabad, stressed on providing quality legal aid to juveniles.

He was delivering key-note address at a State-level conference on ‘Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 and Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012’ with the stakeholders of Andhra Pradesh here on Saturday.

Stating that a lot of work has been done towards delivering justice to juveniles, Justice Ramesh Ranganathan told the legal fraternity that the work done so far is almost nothing when the cases pending is taken into consideration.

He further said, “The objective is to understand each other’s problems and not to criticise each other. We can improve ourselves since the criticism should start from our institution. In Sampoorna Bohra case, the Supreme Court suggested lady officers to preside over Juvenile Justice Board. Our problem is acute shortage of judicial officers. We are in a difficult situation to appoint a full-time officer for Juvenile Justice Board.”

Referring to pendency of juvenile cases, Justice Ramesh said, “Earlier, we used to spend one day. Now it takes three days in a week depending on pendency of cases. That is hardly sufficient. We have a huge pendency.”

Terming Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 as idealistic, the CJ said: “If we implement the act in toto, it can change the entire system.”

Director General of Police N Sambasiva Rao, in his address expressed concern over missing cases of children. Every year, about 2,000 cases of children missing were being registered and in about 1,000 cases, the children were not being traced.

The police department was taking serious note of this trend. Awareness programmes would help reduce such cases, he opined. Police Commissioner Gautam Sawang also attended the meeting.