Virtual hearings can’t be a norm, says top court

NEW DELHI: Virtual courts cannot become the norm as this would envisage that the building in which we sit should be closed, the Supreme Court observed on Friday, expressing its strong reservations on a petition that asked for continuation of virtual court hearings as a matter of fundamental right.

“It is one thing to demand live telecast of court proceedings, and quite another to say that when Covid is receding, people need not come to courts and instead continue with virtual hearing,” the bench of justices L Nageswara Rao and BR Gavai said.

The bench, however, went ahead to issue notice to the Union government, pointing out that the court will take up the petition after four weeks along with a similar plea filed earlier by a group of lawyers.

The court on Friday was hearing a petition by National Federation of Societies for Fast Justice, an advocacy NGO that campaigns for judicial reforms, along with former Central Information Commissioner (CIC) Shailesh Gandhi and former Mumbai Police Commissioner Julio Ribeiro. The petition, drafted by lawyer Siddharth R Gupta, also wants the top court to bar high courts from discontinuing virtual court hearings without the Supreme Court’s approval, pointing out that high courts of Uttarakhand and Gujarat have already issued orders to this effect on August 10 and 16, respectively.

“For more than 70 years, we all understood courts to function physically. It was in view of Covid-19 pandemic that we thought that courts should continue to function and developed this new system of virtual hearing of cases. But virtual courts cannot become a norm as courts have to function physically when normalcy gets restored. The result of seeking virtual hearing as a norm is to envisage that the building where we sit should be closed down,” the bench said.