Indian Kanoon Appeals Delhi High Court Ruling on Right to Be Forgotten
The legal database platform Indian Kanoon has filed an appeal at the Delhi High Court against a single-judge ruling that directed it to de-index and disable name-based searches for certain individuals to enforce the "right to be forgotten."
The appeal was listed before a division bench of Chief Justice DK Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia on a Tuesday and has been adjourned to July 21. The counsel for the platform had sought time because lawyers were abstaining from work.
The appeal challenges a May 29 order issued by a single-judge bench of Justice Sachin Datta. That original ruling established a judicial roadmap for enforcing the right to be forgotten, setting down detailed legal principles for when names can be removed from search results or masked in court records.
Justice Datta's order was delivered in response to petitions filed by 39 individuals, including people acquitted of criminal charges, parties to matrimonial disputes, and individuals whose names appeared incidentally in judicial records. The single judge directed de-indexing in 35 of those cases.
Under the de-indexing directive, judicial records remain accessible on court websites and legal databases, but the names of the concerned individuals are removed as searchable retrieval keys. This restricts easy access to the records through name-based searches.
In its appeal, Indian Kanoon contended that the standards laid down in the May 29 judgment are arbitrary. The platform argued that the concepts of "relevance" and "legitimate public purpose" cited in the ruling are broad, vague, and undefined.
According to the petition, the absence of a clear and exhaustive framework identifying which categories of cases require name-masking could lead to inconsistent judicial approaches. The platform argued this risks arbitrary censorship and unjustifiably restricts the retrievability of court records.
Furthermore, Indian Kanoon stated that the single-judge verdict directed global de-indexing based merely on bare assertions of harm, without an evidentiary fact-finding assessment.
The platform also alleged discrimination, arguing that the directions to disable name-based search functionality were made solely against Indian Kanoon. It noted that several other case management platforms catalog and search judgments from Indian courts and tribunals, making the selective enforcement a violation of the fundamental right to equality.
In the original May 29 judgment, Justice Datta had recognised the right to be forgotten as an integral facet of the fundamental right to privacy. The ruling stated that courts must assess the character of the information, the outcome of the proceedings, the individual's public role, and the continuing relevance of the information when considering de-indexing relief.
