Swapnil Tripathi v/s. Supreme Court of India
- Bhavik Jain
- May 24, 2020
Content :
There are large number of cases pending in Indian courts and considering this situation, it might not be possible for all the interested people to attend thesessions of apex court because of infrastructural restrictions, security reasons, time constraints and other formalities involved in courts. On any given day, Supreme Court is heavily packed with Advocates, litigants, staff members, government officials and police officers and because of this, law students and interns are unable to attend the courts sessions. Various petitions have been filed in the Supreme Court for the live streaming of the sessions of the court.
Many petitioners claimed that cases of national importance that affect the public at large should be displayed for live streaming and it was upheld in the case of Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India . It was also put forward that the apex court should determine the criteria for determining the cases that should be streamed and the exceptional cases that do not fall within this ambit. People representing public interest argued that this step would further help the government to promote transparency and open justice system.
In this matter the court also agreed that this process would help people to easily access the proceedings and re-establish their faith in the justice system. It was also put forward by the petitioners that this concept of live streaming carved out from the right of access to justice guaranteed by the Constitution of India.
Considering these demands the court said that the right granted would not be absolute but it will have certain restrictions. The court insisted that only a few category of cases will be streamed in order to maintain the confidentiality.The court said that it won’t stream matters related to sexual harassment, matrimonial cases, and POCSO cases as these are sensitive cases and they need to be handled with diligence, any disruption of privacy in these can have disastrous effects. The Court also agreed that they would set some guidelines that would be used for regulating the live streaming.
The court also ordered that for live streaming of a case, prior information from the concerned court in writing should be obtained after following the due procedure, however that court will have power to revoke the proceedings at any stage Suo moto.
