New Delhi: Five new judges were appointed to the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Dipak Gupta, Mohan M. Shantanagoudar, S. Abdul Nazeer and Navin Sinha—chief justices of the high courts of Madras, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Karnataka and Rajasthan, respectively—will be sworn in on Friday.

Their names had been recommended by the Supreme Court collegium in January.

The fresh appointments will take the number of Supreme Court judges to 28, still three short of the court’s full strength. This is the second set of appointments to the top court since it declared the National Judicial Appointments Commission (NJAC) Act, 2014, unconstitutional and an infringement on judicial independence. In May 2016, four judges were appointed to the court.

The appointments have been made inspite of a standoff between the apex court collegium and the Centre in finalizing the memorandum of procedure (MoP) for appointing judges.

Last week, chief justice J.S. Khehar said that the MoP is likely to be finalized by the end of February. The government’s top law officer, attorney general Mukul Rohatgi, in January requested the chief justice to not pass any more judicial orders on appointments, which the chief justice rejected.

In October 2015 , a five-judge constitution bench struck down the Constitution (Ninety-ninth Amendment) Act, 2014, and the NJAC Act that sought to give the executive a say in the appointment of top judges and restored the collegium system of making judicial appointments.

Under the collegium system, a group of the five senior-most Supreme Court judges appoints other judges to the higher judiciary—the high courts and the Supreme Court. Articles 124 and 217 of the Constitution stipulate that judges will be appointed by the President of India after “consultation" with the chief justice of India and other judges.

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