Facing serious trouble due to right to be forgotten judgment: Indian Kanoon tells Delhi High Court

Online legal judgment database Indian Kanoon told the Delhi High Court on Wednesday that it is facing serious issues due to the recent right to be forgotten judgment of High Court which directed the platform to de-index and disable name-based search functionality for a batch of judgments and orders.

Senior Advocate Arvind Datar appeared for the platform and made the submission before a Division Bench of Justices C Hari Shankar and Vinod Kumar.

The Court was hearing a batch of appeals filed by Indian Kanoon against the right to be forgotten verdict delivered by a single-judge on June 1.

Datar stated that Indian Kanoon is the only legal website against which the order is passed.

“My difficulty is this. I am the only legal website. Now there is this thing that I should completely remove the name-based facility. Now, all legal websites have full search facility, free search facility,” Datar said.

The Court was informed that IndianKanoon had filed other appeals against the judgement as well, but no notices have been issued in the matters, and the cases are listed for hearing in October. 

The Bench pointed out that the matters were adjourned to October as the counsel appearing for IndianKanoon took an adjournment. 

Datar said that the October date is very far away and the platform is facing serious trouble.

“Can your lordships take it on an earlier date? Similar cases are coming up in other courts and this is being cited as a precedent. I am having serious trouble. I have already deleted 80 judgments. So, I can come next week? On 13 [August], I can come before your lordships. 6 October is very far. And they [the orders] don’t include SCC Online. They don’t include any other legal website. I am the only person who has to remove all the judgments,” Datar stated.

The Court agreed to Datar’s request and listed the appeals for preliminary hearing on August 13.

Single-judge Justice Sachin Datta had on June 1 recognised a person's right to be forgotten and held that individuals could seek removal of their names from searchable versions of court records where the information was "no longer relevant" or served "no legitimate public purpose."

In its appeal, India Kanoon said that the single-judge misread the Supreme Court's privacy verdict in KS Puttaswamy v Union of India. It contended that the judgment's brief observations on a "right to be forgotten" were obiter dicta (things said in passing) and do not create an enforceable right for litigants to erase names from judicial records.

According to the plea, the "relevance" and "public purpose" test set by the single-judge is vague and could lead to inconsistent, arbitrary outcomes across courts.

As per the appeal,

"The present appellant contests the Impugned Judgment and the directions... on the basis that the recognition of a ‘right to be forgotten’ does not strike a careful balance between the right to information and the principle of open justice under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India and individual claims to ‘right to privacy’ against public records/court records."

Further, Indian Kanoon has claimed the ruling unfairly singles it out among multiple legal databases, violating its right to equality under Article 14, and unreasonably restricts its freedom to conduct business under Article 19(1(g), since name-based search is central to how lawyers, litigants, and researchers use the platform.

Any redaction of records should originate at the level of court registries rather than being imposed on private platforms, the plea said.

As per the plea,

"Name-based searches are the easiest possible way to query and search legal databases. These name-based searches are the equivalent of searching for case history, case status, or judgments by way of ‘party name’ on this Hon’ble Court’s website. It serves an important purpose in case retrieval."

Senior Advocate Arvind Datar along with advocates Apar Gupta, Naman Kumar and Uzma Sheikh appeared for Indian Kanoon.