Critically examine the tension between open justice and individual privacy in the context of digital publication of court records.

Q. Critically examine the tension between open justice and individual privacy in the context of digital publication of court records. (15 marks, 250-350 words)

Open justice — public access to hearings and judgments — is a constitutional safeguard of judicial accountability. But once records are digitised and indexed by search engines, a party's name becomes permanently retrievable, colliding with privacy under Article 21, recognised as a fundamental right in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017) by a nine-judge bench [1].

The case for open justice - Public scrutiny of reasoning deters arbitrariness; judgments are precedent, and anonymised law is unusable law for citation and research. - Free online repositories and e-courts have democratised legal access for litigants and lawyers who cannot afford paid databases. - Masking touches the public's right to information about who was prosecuted and why — an accountability cost, not merely a technical one.

The case for privacy - Digital memory is permanent while human memory fades; a few keystrokes in an employer's background check can resurrect a closed case [3]. - An acquittal is a judicial declaration of innocence; perpetual online visibility inflicts a civil penalty the criminal process itself withheld — as the Karnataka High Court held in 2026, ordering registries, State police, Google and Indian Kanoon to mask an acquitted woman's name in an Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act case [3]. - Harm falls unevenly on women and vulnerable litigants in matrimonial, POCSO and trafficking matters, deterring them from approaching courts at all.

Where the tension remains unresolved - India has no codified right to be forgotten; the DPDP Act, 2023 grants erasure against data fiduciaries but does not settle judicial records [2], leaving relief judge-made and inconsistent across benches. - Enforcement spans court registries, police and private intermediaries, with no statutory compliance mechanism.

Puttaswamy itself framed privacy as a qualified right, so the answer is calibration, not choice. A statutory framework — anonymisation-by-default in sensitive categories, published masking criteria, and machine-readable takedown duties for intermediaries — would preserve precedent while restoring dignity, honouring both transparency and Article 21.

(~315 words)

Sources: 1. Supreme Court of India — Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India (2017), 9-judge privacy bench — privacy as a fundamental right under Article 21; qualified nature of the right 2. The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 — PRS Legislative Research — erasure right against data fiduciaries; absence of a codified right to be forgotten for judicial records 3. Karnataka HC recognises the 'right to be forgotten', The Hindu, 5 August 2026 — masking order against registries, police, Google and Indian Kanoon; acquittal and background-check harm