Let us start web casting of court proceedings on pilot basis says AG, verdict reserved

New Delhi, Aug 24: The Supreme Court has reserved its verdict on a petition that sought live streaming of court proceedings.

During the hearing, Attorney General K K Venugopal suggested to starting web casting of important case hearings in Chief Justice's court on a pilot project basis. He said that depending on the success of web casting of the CJI court proceedings, the facility could be gradually extended to other courtrooms of the Supreme Court.

Further the AG suggested that web casting of live courtroom proceedings should be delayed by 70 seconds to allow the Judges to mute the sound when a counsel misbehaves, or if matter is sensitive as it involved individual privacy or national security.

The court said, "right now many live tweet court proceedings and a dozen websites give details of judges' observations. So what is the big deal in live streaming of court proceedings."

The petitioner in the case, Indira Jaisingh said that certain safeguards need to be in place so that the clips are not commercially exploited or misused. The Supreme Court has sought the assistance of the Attorney General of India on a petition that seeks live streaming of proceedings of the Constitution Bench in cases having national importance.

In her petition, Jaisingh said that the norm world over was to allow proceedings to be recorded. She further added that some judges on the Constitution Benches were reluctant about this as it would capture every sentence in the banter between judges and advocates which were merely a way to elicit responses and not a sign of how the judge would finally decide the case.

She however added that there were different methods to resolve such reluctance and also listed the methods that courts globally had adopted. Some courts allow publication after a gap of 30 minutes, some ban recording of proceedings only in trial courts as that would compromise witnesses, some give edited versions of the proceedings, some record the proceedings but do not air it in public, some give out transcripts of proceedings, she also said in her petition.