Courting transparency

The Chief Justice’s idea of live-streaming and telecasting live proceedings of the Supreme Court is to be welcomed. The CJI is seeking a consensus within the court to try and take forward a path breaking concept, which can bering transparency and openness that can reinforce the faith of the public in the judicial system. The idea was mooted in a 2018 case in the top court and experiments were conducted in the Gujarat high court, which telecast proceedings on the YouTube channel. The pandemic may have enforced virtual hearings on the judiciary but it does appear the experience can prove beneficial if it leads to telecasts and live-streaming from the Supreme Court of India.

Progress in the form of open media access was seen recently in online media portals being able to hear court proceedings. In fact, it was the reporting in online portals of the observations of Madras high court judges on the Election Commission of India that brought out the severity of issues surrounding polls in the time of the pandemic. Contentious though the comments were and also frowned upon by the top court, such access to reporting of court proceedings by the media allowed the matter to come out in the public domain.

There may be much that is opaque in the manner in which the wheels of justice move, especially in areas like the process of nomination of judges to the higher judiciary. While such matters should be confidential and handled between the collegium and the executive branch of government in power, there is no reason why the proceedings in celebrated cases cannot be telecast live so that the wider legal fraternity as well as members of the public can witness them. Of course, the matter of what is live-streamed or telecast should lie strictly in the control of the highest judiciary so that issues like those that popped up in the famous O.J. Simpson case in the US do not crop up.