Right to be forgotten: Supreme Court stays Madras High Court direction to pull down judgment from Indian Kanoon

The Supreme Court on Wednesday stayed a Madras High Court judgment directing online legal database Indian Kanoon to take down a judgment from its site in a bid to uphold a litigant's right to be forgotten [Ikanoon Software Development Pvt Ltd v. Karthick Theodore & ors]..A Bench of Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud with Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra sought the response of the Madras High Court and said that it would have to settle the law on this issue."We entertain criminal appeals. We may convict or acquit. Once we deliver a judgment, it is part of public record. If it's a case of child sexual abuse, then names can be masked. But how can the High Court direct a judgment to be pulled down? It will have serious ramifications", the CJI remarked..The Bench was hearing an appeal against a recent verdict by the Madurai bench of the Madras High Court. The High Court had ordered that the name and personal details of a person acquitted in a rape case be deleted from court orders and judgments. In particular, it had directed Indian Kanoon to take down the copy of the judgment from its site.In doing so, it had invoked the 'right to be forgotten' principle to order such redaction, stating that courts being “service institutions committed to the cause of justice," cannot keep their eyes shut to citizen’s right to privacy.It observed that while the sanctity of original court records cannot be diluted, courts were expected to perform a “balancing act between aggregation of data required to perform its functions and protection of personal data so collected.”This led to the instant appeal filed by the web portal before the top court. Advocates Apar Gupta and Abiha Zaidi appeared for Indian Kanoon..The Supreme Court in its landmark judgment of 2017, which held privacy as a fundamental right, had made a mention of the right to be forgotten. In a verdict passed in July 2022, it had directed that personal information of parties in a sexual offence case be masked on the internet, so their details are not thrown up by search engines..The issued has come up before multiple High Courts in the recent past. The Delhi High Court had, in August 2021, issued notice in a plea moved by two businessmen seeking the removal of news articles from the internet on their past arrest and trial in a criminal case after their acquittal in the said case.The Madras High Court earlier had the occasion to consider the issue when a man moved the Court seeking the redaction of his name from court judgments and orders after he was acquitted in the case. It had initially opined that an accused person who is eventually acquitted of all charges is entitled to have his name redacted from court orders. However, ultimately, the judge concluded that the right to be forgotten cannot exist when it comes to judgments of the court.In 2020, the Kerala High Court had admitted a plea seeking erasure of the petitioner’s personal details from a Google search result.The Orissa High Court has also lamented the lack of a mechanism to permanently delete information from the internet in order to safeguard the right to be forgotten. The same was observed in a bail application moved by a person who videographed intimate photographs of his sexual assault on a woman and uploaded them on Facebook.