Of the many findings in the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy and JALDI's Judicial Transparency Index Report, released on August 1, 2026, one stat should stop readers in their tracks: not a single one of India's 25 High Courts publishes a code of conduct for its judges.
None tell the public what kind of behaviour can actually be complained about. And when it comes to disclosing whether a judge was ever sanctioned, only 2 High Courts in the entire country have anything on record.
The report tested High Courts against 7 indicators of disciplinary accountability, grouped into four clusters:
whether courts publish a code of conduct applicable to judges and
whether they specify the conduct against which complaints can be made;
whether they publish the procedure for filing a complaint;
whether they disclose the process and timeline for investigating alleged misconduct, and
whether complainants are informed of the investigation's findings and its final outcome;
whether complainants are informed about the outcome of the disciplinary proceedings; and
whether courts publish decisions where sanctions were actually imposed.
Across all 25 High Courts and all 7 indicators, the results are close to a blank sheet.
Only the Madras High Court makes available any information on the conduct that can be complained about - a general notice on its website stating that "bribe giving and receiving is an offense," with a Registrar Vigilance contact for complaints, which the report counted only because the notice does not explicitly exclude judges. A handful of courts offer general grievance-redressal pages not built with judicial complaints in mind. These include the High Court of Punjab and Haryana's "Citizen Corner" and the Sikkim High Court's grievance redressal page. Others, such as the High Courts of Allahabad, Himachal Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, run mechanisms that explicitly exclude High Court judges from their scope. On process and timelines for investigating a complaint and on informing complainants of the outcome, the report found nothing published by any court at all.
The starkest indicator is the last one: publishing decisions where sanctions were imposed on judges. Only the High Courts of Tripura and Jammu & Kashmir had anything to show. The former's orders were genuinely detailed, laying out the conduct investigated, the rules governing the inquiry, the reasoning and the penalty.The latter's disclosure was thinner, recording only the finding and penalty, without the underlying conduct or legal framework. Every other High Court in the country scored zero on this indicator.
This is not simply a High Court problem. The Supreme Court fares only marginally better and largely on paper. It publishes a document called the Restatement of the Values of Judicial Life (1997), setting out standards judges are expected to follow. But the conduct against which complaints can actually be made and the procedure for filing one are not published on its website. More tellingly, the Court has a formal mechanism for investigating complaints against its own judges, the Committee on In-House Procedure. Yet, no report of that Committee's work could be located on the site. Orders imposing sanctions on Supreme Court or High Court judges were similarly untraceable.
The contrast with the Court's own conduct on financial disclosure sharpens the point. In 2025, the Supreme Court adopted a Full Court resolution requiring judges to declare their assets. 30 of its 33 sitting judges have complied, a relatively strong compliance rate. It shows that transparency is achievable when an institution commits to a norm and follows through. Disciplinary information has received no comparable commitment.
The report points to the United Kingdom's Judicial Conduct Investigations Office, whose disciplinary statements publish the conduct investigated, the process followed, the rules applied and the final decision, as a workable model. Its recommendations for Indian courts follow the same logic: publish the code of conduct, provide an accessible complaint mechanism online and offline, and publish sanction decisions with enough detail to mean something.
The report's findings sit against a backdrop the report itself does not discuss: decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence wrestling with exactly this gap. In K Veeraswami v. Union of India (1991), a Constitution Bench held that judges are "public servants" who can be investigated and prosecuted for corruption, but only with the Chief Justice of India's prior sanction, a filter that itself has no published, public-facing procedure. In Sub-Committee on Judicial Accountability v. Union of India (1991), the Court held that Parliament's impeachment process under Article 124(4) remains the only constitutionally sanctioned route to remove a judge for misconduct, with no lesser, publicly accountable disciplinary tier in between. C Ravichandran Iyer v. Justice A.M. Bhattacharjee (1995) is where the "in-house procedure" the report's suggestions implicitly gesture toward actually originates. The Court held that minor judicial misconduct falling short of impeachable "proved misbehaviour" could be handled through internal peer review, a mechanism the judgment itself conceded had "no legal sanction" and, which, as this report now shows three decades on, still produces nothing visible to the public it is meant to reassure.
And in In Re: Justice CS Karnan (2017), the Court finally sanctioned a sitting High Court judge, not through any disciplinary process, published or otherwise, but by convicting him of criminal contempt and sentencing him to 6 months' imprisonment, the first such action against a sitting High Court judge in India's history.
The Judges (Inquiry) Act, 1968, the law that gives teeth to Article 124(4)'s impeachment route, is being tested right now by the case of Justice Yashwant Varma. After a fire at his official Delhi residence in March 2025 turned up unaccounted cash, the Supreme Court broke from its usual silence and published a 25-page in-house inquiry report. Then-CJI Sanjiv Khanna set up a three-member committee that went on to recommend his removal. Over 200 MPs signed a motion in July and Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla constituted the statutory panel required under the 1968 Act the following month. Then, in April 2026, Justice Varma resigned, a move widely expected, going by the precedent set by Justice Soumitra Sen and Justice PD Dinakaran, to make the whole process infructuous. The committee kept going anyway. This month, it found all 3 charges against him proved and the Speaker chose to table the report in Parliament regardless.
Whether resignation can still let a judge walk away from a completed disciplinary finding is now, for the first time, a genuinely open question. This case shows that the 1968 Act's process actually works. A complaint led to an investigation, evidence was weighed and guilt was found. But it only became visible to the public because of two rare things: the Supreme Court chose to publish its report (which it normally doesn't) and the whole process took more than a year. So, the law can hold a judge accountable, but normally, none of it would be seen by the public at all.
Read together with the report's findings, the case law confirms a structural point: India has never lacked judicial misconduct doctrine. What it has lacked, at every level from complaint to sanction, is a published record the public can actually see.
Shadab Khan is a 3rd Year B.A.LL.B. student Faculty of Law, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.