The Kerala High Court might soon publish its orders online

The Kerala High Court, established in 1956, is one of the most prominent high courts in the country. It has produced many excellent minds and delivered scores of landmark judgments in its 63 years of existence..The High Court functions from an eight-storied building situated adjacent to the Arabian Sea, in a pristine location in the city of Ernakulam..However, one glaring shortcoming stands out. The High Court does not upload its orders on its website. Only the final judgments pronounced in a case can be accessed online, while interim orders have to be procured directly from the Filing Section. The Kerala High Court might perhaps be the only High Court that does not extend the facility of accessing orders online..This puts litigants at a great inconvenience, as they have to rely on lawyers to procure copies of orders from the Filing Section. This procedure itself is lengthy and cumbersome..In case of an order with respect to an admission matter, a process has to be filed which would include a copy of the petition, process memo, and handover memo. The same has to be handed over to the Filing Section, which then puts a seal on it and hands it back to the applicant..This is then taken to the respective section (seat). The handover memo is then verified by the Section Officer and the Assistant Registrar before the copy of the order is finally handed over..In a pending case, the procedure essentially remains the same, but would additionally require the furnishing of a ‘communication batta’ along with the process memo..However, this difficulty might soon be resolved. The High Court has decided that it will migrate the website to Unified CIS1.0. Once that is done, other litigant friendly measures will be carried out..Bar & Bench spoke to Additional Registrar AV Pradeepkumar who said,.“The current website was developed by NIC. We have now decided to migrate to Unified CIS1.0. We have already discussed it in the meeting of the judges. Computerisation committee is also planning to implement it at the earliest. We are carrying out the periphery development for the same. .Once the migration is done, we will take the next step which is to make the website citizen and litigant centric.”.The Additional Registrar also mentioned that the migration will be complete before the Onam vacation, for which the Court shuts during mid-August. Subsequently, other steps including uploading daily orders will be carried out..The Bar has responded positively to this move. A senior member at the Bar who did not wish to be named said,.“It is a very good move for litigants and lawyers alike. Procurement of orders will become much easier. Most High Courts already have this basic facility. It should have been done long ago.”.Ananthu Bahuleyan, a relatively junior member at the Bar had this to say:.“This was a much-needed step. The current practice is outdated and causes great inconvenience to litigants and public. They have got no other option but to rely on lawyers for obtaining order copies. .It [the current practice] is also not beneficial for lawyers since they have to use the services of their clerks to pull out the order through filing section. It is a waste of lawyers’ and clerks’ time and energy. Importantly, even for a mere perusal of an order passed during the last hearing, lawyers have to go through the whole tedious process of getting the order from the filing section. This at times becomes very inconvenient in situations when a case listed today is posted for the next day etc.”.The computerisation committee of the High Court consists of five judge. It is headed by Justice Vinod Chandran and comprises Justices A Muhamed Mustaque, AK Jayasankaran Nambiar, PB Suresh Kumar and Raja Vijayaraghavan. The Committee meets every week.