Indian Kanoon Moves Hc Against De Indexing Order

Indian Kanoon has moved the division bench of Delhi High Court against a single judge’s ruling directing the legal database platform to de-index and disable name-based searches across all its platforms and domains for court records and news articles of certain individuals, to give effect to the right to be forgotten.The appeal was listed before a bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia on Tuesday but was adjourned to July 21 after counsel for the platform sought time in view of lawyers abstaining from work.In an order on May 29, thesingle judge bench ofjustice Sachin Dattacreated a judicial roadmap for enforcing the right to be forgotten, setting down detailed legal principles for when names can be removed from search results of search engines and legal databases or masked in court records.The single judge, while considering petitions filed by 39 individuals including persons acquitted of criminal charges, parties to matrimonial disputes, and individuals whose names appeared incidentally in judicial records despite not being parties to the proceedings, directed de-indexing in 35 cases.While de-indexing does not result in the erasure of a judicial record, which remains accessible on court websites and legal databases, it removes the concerned name as a searchable retrieval key, thereby restricting easy access to the record through name-based searches. Masking, by contrast, is modification of the public version of a record by replacing names and personal identifiers with neutral references such as “ABC” or “XYZ.”In its petition, Indian Kanoon contended that the standard laid down by the judgment is “arbitrary” and the concepts of “relevance” and “legitimate public purpose” it cites are broad, vague, and undefined.The absence of a clear and exhaustive framework identifying the categories of cases in which names should be masked could lead to inconsistent judicial approaches and, this, it argued, risks arbitrary censorship and unjustifiably restricts the retrievability and of court records.The petition stated that the verdict directed global de-indexing without an evidentiary fact-finding assessment of harm, and merely on bare assertion of harm. It added that the verdict has arbitrarily and in violation of the fundamental right to equality, made directions for disabling name based search functionality only against one legal database even though there are several other case management platforms available online for cataloging and searching judgement/orders of various Indian court and tribunals.The direction, it said creates a classification discrimination against the platform, the petition added.What the May 29 judgment saidWhile recognising the right to be forgotten as an integral facet of the fundamental right to privacy, the judge said that the courts while considering the de-indexing relief must assess the information’s character, outcome of the concluded proceedings, an individual’s public role of the individual concerned, and the accuracy and continuing relevance of the information.The judge said that in cases ending in acquittal, discharge, or quashing, continued unrestricted name-based searchability of judicial records undermines the presumption of innocence and creates a disconnect between legal exoneration and digital visibility and in cases where proceedings conclude through settlement or compounding, continued online accessibility may fail the proportionality test if the harm caused to an individual outweighs any legitimate public interest.In purely civil and matrimonial disputes, the bench noted that family life and personal relationships lie within the privacy protections of Article 21, and once such proceedings conclude, their unrestricted digital searchability serves little purpose and bears no meaningful nexus with open justice, it held.