Legal News Updates

We bring you the updates for last week. Hope it updates you with all the news from legal world.

Updates: 23rd November to 07 November 2014.

The Supreme Court has constituted a Special Bench christened ‘Social Justice Bench’ to achieve the Constitutional  goal of securing ‘social justice for the citizens of the country. The bench comprising of Justice Madan B Lokur and Justice UU Lalit will hear all cases in the Supreme Court falling within the domain of “social justice”. The Bench will start functioning from December 12 and will sit at 2 pm on every Friday.

The Centre is planning to partially open up legal market to foreign firms. According to the proposal put forward by the Centre, foreign lawyers could be permitted to practice in India in conjunction with Indian lawyers, as a joint venture, with a cap on foreign participation. Also, advisory or non-litigious services in Indian law could be opened up subject to foreign lawyers going through a prequalification examination in various aspects of Indian law. However, the Bar Council of India and Society of Indian Law Firms (SILF) have voiced their opposition to this proposal.

The Delhi High Court refused to quash the FIR filed against three men who tried to molest a Delhi Police Constable. The woman registered an FIR against the three persons, who incidentally lived in her locality only. She later agreed to take back her complaint, after the intermediation of some people. When the matter reached the Delhi High Court for quashing of FIR, Justice Pratibha Rani, refusing to quash the FIR said, ‘if a woman police officer can’t walk on the street what will happen to common girls?’

The Union Cabinet, chaired by the Prime Minister has approved the introduction of the Companies (Amendment) Bill, 2014 in Parliament to make certain amendments in the Companies Act, 2013. The Companies Act, 2013 (Act) was notified on 29.8.2013. Out of 470 sections in the Act, 283 sections and 22 sets of Rules corresponding to such sections have so far been brought into force. In order to address some issues raised by stakeholders such as Chartered Accountants and professionals, some amendments have been proposed.

The Allahabad High Court dismissed a PIL challenging Rule 7 of the recently released Bar Council of India Rules, 2014. Under Rule 7, a lawyer must practice for two years in a trial court and three in a high court before being allowed to practice before the apex court. It was dismissed not on merits, but on the ground that Rule 7 has still not been notified and therefore it would be an exercise in futility if the petition is examined on merits.

The Delhi High Court has held that the Competition Commission of India (CCI) has the right to file an appeal in cases where its probes have been stayed by courts. The order came after a CCI appeal in a dispute involving JCB India Ltd, in which all CCI proceedings, including the probe, were stayed by the HC after its director general raided JCB’s premises. Doubts were raised whether CCI could file such an appeal, as it was the CCI that ordered the probe against JCB in the first place; the court ruled that CCI has the right. The court also held that “the interference by us at this stage is unwarranted”. It asked both parties to raise their issues before the single judge who is hearing the case.

The Delhi High Court recently interpreted S.107A expansively to conclude that it is applicable when a party exports a patented product to a third party outside India as long as the purpose of export is the facilitation of research. The case relates to the Compulsory License granted by the Court to Natco for the compound Sorafenib tosylate. One of the conditions was that Natco should use the licensed product “solely for the purpose of making, using, offering for sale and selling the drug covered by the patent for the purpose of treating HCC and RCC in humans within the territory of India”. However, Bayer found that Natco was exporting the product outside India. In March this year, an interim order was passed by the Delhi High Court preventing Natco from such export. The present application was filed by Natco to seek permission from the Court to export 1 kilogram of Sorafenib to a Chinese Pharmaceutical Company for preparation of a trial batch of the generic drug in China.

The application filed by Venus Remedies Ltd. (the applicant) for an invention titled “Parenteral Composition Comprising Ceftriaxone and Vancomycin for Bacterial Resistance and Process of Preparation Thereof” was opposed in a pre grant opposition by (Akums Drugs & Pharmaceuticals) on the grounds of lack of inventive step as required under Section 2(1)(j), 2(1)(ja) and 2(1)(l) and also on the grounds of section 3(d) and 3(e) of the Patent Act. The opposition, however, was not successful. The invention was a single unit combination of two incompatible antibiotics (Ceftriaxone and Vancomycin) which are combined together with stabilizing agents, such as L-arginine, EDTA and Na₂CO_3.  The Controller observed that the claimed invention was held not to be a mere aggregation of property/features since Ceftriaxone and Vancomycin are made compatible, due to the existence of a chemical stabilizing and solubizing agent. The opponent also contended that various studies have shown the concomitant use of vancomycin and ceftriaxone and cited two documents.  However, both these documents failed to form ‘prior art’ because they were published on 3/3/2006 and 20/12/2005 after the filing of the present patent application in 14/2/2005. Moreover, the prior art failed to contemplate the problem of incompatibility between Ceftriaxone and Vancomycin. Also, the contention on Section 3(d) was dismissed on the ground that nothing in the prior art qualified as a “known substance” and hence Section 3(d) was not attracted.  The Controller declared that that the invention was both a technical advance as well as economically significant and therefore qualified the inventiveness criteria.

We hope that this summarizes the last week's News. Your comments and suggestions are welcomed.

Until next post of weekly News updates.

Anjana Srinivasan, (2nd Year student of IIT Kharagpur Law School)

For 'OFF Court.'

Disclaimer: This blog or any post thereof is not to be considered to be in any way associated with the official stand of IIT kharagpur or RGSOIPL on the issues being discussed in the said post. The opinions on the blog are the authors own and should not be considered as legal advice.