SC to go live with streaming its first proceedings

|HT|

The Supreme Court will go live on Friday with streaming its first proceedings, more than three years after a Supreme Court ruling recommended live-streaming its hearings.

A notice uploaded on the top court website said that the proceedings of the ceremonial bench, which will bid adieu to Chief Justice of India NV Ramana, shall be live-streamed through a webcast portal.

This will be the first time the top court will live-stream its proceedings although it remains unclear whether this will henceforth be a regular feature or the telecast of the ceremonial bench proceedings is being carried out as a pilot project.

The Supreme Court’s e-Committee, headed by its sitting judge, Justice Dhananjaya Y Chandrachud, had been working on a proposal to launch an exclusive platform for live-streaming court proceedings.

The proposition to have an exclusive platform to live-stream apex court proceedings formed part of the third phase of the e-courts project, which is an ambitious initiative to implement the use of information and technology in India’s judiciary.

By a judgment in September 2018, the Supreme Court had declared live telecast of court proceedings part of the right to access justice under Article 21 of the Constitution.

Subsequently, Supreme Court’s e-Committee’s came out with model guidelines to regulate live-streaming of court proceedings in India.

Currently, six high courts in the country, namely Gujarat, Orissa, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Patna, and Madhya Pradesh, live-stream their proceedings through their own channels on YouTube.

(Except for the headline and the pictorial description, this story has not been edited by THE DEN staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)