Suryakant Jena

Cuttack/Bhubaneswar: The Orissa High Court on Sunday issued a set of revised guidelines for its functioning and subordinate courts during the period of lockdown 3.0 in the wake of Covid-19 outbreak.

A notice regarding this informed that the normal working of the Apex and the subsidiary courts shall continue to remain suspended till May 17 in view of the extension of the lockdown for the third time.

As per the modified directive, the Orissa High Court shall function on all five working days of the week with one Division Bench on Tuesday and Thursday and five Single Benches on each working day of the week till May 15.

The judges sitting in Division Bench shall hold Single Benches after completion of the Division Bench, the notice stated.

Highlighting about the timings of functioning, the High Court has mandated that all sub-ordinate courts and their offices falling under RED Zone shall function for ONE hour as per the directions already issued, to take up criminal and civil matters of extremely urgent nature.

Similarly, in the case of ORANGE Zones, the High Court has asked all subsidiary judicial units and their offices to function for TWO hours, i.e. from 9 am to 11 am, except in Berhampur, Bhubaneswar, Chhatrapur, Koraput (Sadar), Puri (Sadar). In such cases, where there are no morning sittings, the court can sit from 11 am to 1 pm.

For GREEN Zones, the courts can start from usual hours, function up to the lunch break for two and half hours.

In case any court premises comes under containment area declared by the State government, the concerned district judge shall have the power to shut down the court for the containment period and intimate the same to the High Court.

The State apex court has also laid down strict rules for officers and staff of all courts to be followed as precautionary measures to prevent Covid-19 during the course of normalising operation during the third phase of lockdown and thereafter.

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