The Pinarayi Vijayan led Left government, in its second term, has notified the appointment of 20 Special Government Pleaders, 53 Senior Government Pleaders and 52 Government Pleaders for representing the State government in cases before the Kerala High Court.
Advocate General Gopalakrishna Kurup K, had on July 26, forwarded a list of names of advocates eligible to be appointed as government law officers as per the Kerala Government Law Officers (Appointment & Conditions of Service) and Conduct of Case Rules, 1978.
Thereafter, the government issued an order on Thursday clearing the appointment of 105 lawyers. The appointment is for a period of 3 years with effect from August 1, 2021.
Eighteen out of the 52 GPs are women. Most notable of the new appointments in this category is that of Advocate Reshmitha R Chandran who had filed cases at the Supreme Court for the CPI(M) Government in it's previous term.
Recently, she had filed a petition before the Supreme Court on behalf of Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas seeking probe into the Pegasus snooping scandal.
53 advocates have been appointed or elevated from previous Government Pleader positions to the designation of Senior GP.
Of the 20 Special GPs who have been appointed, five are women -MR Sreelatha (Finance), Latha T Thankappan (SC/ST), Deepa KR (Local Self Governance), Ambika Devi (prevention of atrocities against women and children)and Sudha Devi N (land acquisition)
Advocates CE Unnikrishnan and TB Hood have been appointed as Special GPs in the office of the Advocate general.
P Santhosh Kumar (industry), Rajesh A (vigilance), Robin Raj (SC/ST), SU Nasser (criminal), K B Ramanand (office of the additional advocate general), Mohammad Rafeeq (tax), Tajuddin PP (cooperation) ML Sajeevan (revenue), RanjithS (Office of the additional advocate general), MH Hanil Kumar (revenue), TP Sajan (forest), Nagaraj Narayanan (forest) and Cyriac Kurian (irrigation) are the other Special GPs.