A batch of intra-court appeals filed before the Delhi High Court by Indian Kanoon to challenge a verdict dated 01-06-2026 of a Single Judge wherein the ‘right to be forgotten’ was recognized under the fundamental right to privacy were heard by a Division Bench of Justice C. Hari Shankar and Justice Vinod Kumar.
The Single Judge decided a batch of 38 writ petitions seeking de-indexing/de-linking of the petitioners’ names from search engines like Google and Yahoo, restriction of name-based searchability on Indian Kanoon, and in some instances relief against publications regarding reporting of criminal proceedings from which the present respondent was later discharged. The factual matrix in each individual writ petition was considered and in 34 out of 38, directions for de-indexing were issued to the search engines and India Kanoon was directed to restrict name-based search on its platform.
The appellants submitted that a reported judgment may contain personal information but a judgment per se is not private information as it is a record, which is why information privacy cannot be invoked to de-index or mask a judgment.
The respondent contended that a constitutional court is not disabled from enforcing a fundamental right merely because the legislature has not yet provided a statutory mechanism and said that “the statute follows the Constitution, not the other way around.” It was also submitted that three recognised facets of Article 21 had been invoked cumulatively, i.e. the right to privacy, the right to reputation, and the presumption of innocence.
The appellant on the other hand submitted that public record/judicial record can never be restricted while relying on R. Rajagopal v. State of T.N. (1994) 6 SCC 632. However, the respondent contended that the said case law pre-dated internet and that its principles were broad principles only, stating that law would need to evolve case-by-case.
The Court opined that to say that one can search by case number and other indexes apart from the case name was an absurd argument as it was not only impractical but also impossible. The Court went on to say that “none of us can even remember the case number of the cases that we have handled”. It was further said that this argument was also impractical if one wants to know about the Kesavananda Bharati judgment, i.e., the most important judgment in Indian Constitutional history.
Referring to practical realities, the Court said that only a person preparing for a case or doing some research in law or a law student will be in need of judgments as its is not every layman on the road who is going to look for such judgments. It was said that such persons do not have the luxury of spending hours trying to find out a particular judgment by some alternate way and that when access to a judgment cannot be done by case name, for practical purposes that particular judgment is blocked.
Stating that Indian Kanoon is a free platform, the Court said that the vast majority of legal profession are persons who are in mufassil towns appearing before judges of small causes, etc., who do not have the monetary resources to get subscription of platforms like SCC OnLine and Manupatra. The Court said that blocking access by a judgment’s name leads to blocking of the livelihood of a common practitioner who cannot afford paid platforms as his livelihood is dependent on access to the law and legal judgments.
The respondent submitted that this was not the end of the proportionality analysis and that the impact on searchers must be weighed against, not treated as automatically defeating the individual’s competing Article 21 interest in dignity, reputation and freedom from being perpetually confronted with a stale/discharged proceeding. It was also contended that the object was not render a person to be ‘forgotten’ absolutely as the record remains, the law laid down remains, other search routes remain, but only to reduce the ease/degree of accessibility, which the double proportionality test also calibrates.
The Court stated that the case was being treated seriously because of the livelihood and access-to-law rights of a large section of the legal profession and indigent litigants, who were dependent on Indian Kanoon as a free resource, weighed against an individual’s dignitary/privacy interest.
After partly hearing the respondent’s arguments, the Court rose and listed the matter for further hearing on 21-09-2026.