The Delhi High Court ruled on Wednesday that allowing name-based searches in legal databases for court records serves the public interest. The court emphasized that disabling such searches would create significant challenges, describing it as a “herculean” task. This decision underscores the importance of accessibility in the judicial system, ensuring that individuals can easily locate relevant legal information.
“If you access the judgement by going into the subject involved, it is a herculean effort to do that. It is not even remotely a substitute to remove the name (based search). With the writ petition number, case details, you will never be able to access any judgment. De-indexing is a directive issued to a private platform that does not result in the erasure of a judicial record, which remains accessible on court websites and legal databases. It merely removes the concerned name as a searchable retrieval key, thereby restricting easy access to the record through name-based searches. In the high court, the platform’s lawyer Arvind Datar, submitted that by virtue of this direction in the verdict all the reports concerning a person will have to be removed. In its petition, the platform stated that the single judge laid down an arbitrary standard for de-indexing and disabling name-based searches in cases where information is considered no longer relevant or lacking a legitimate public purpose.
The court made these remarks while hearing an appeal filed by Indian Kanoon against a single judge’s May 29 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. Also Read I Boss’s stern behaviour not suicide abetment: Supreme Court On May 29, the single judge created 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.
If the single judge says that one of the considerations which can give the balance is public interest, public interest is in favour of access to this,” the judges said. 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 While recognising the right to be forgotten as an integral facet of the fundamental right to privacy.
