Discuss how the Supreme Court's live-streaming policy seeks to balance the right to open justice with the risk of judicial statements being taken out of context or misattributed.

Live-streaming of court proceedings, recognised in Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India (2018) and operationalised through the Court's Rules on Live-Streaming and Recording of Court Proceedings [1], extends the open-court principle to the digital public. The policy therefore tries to widen access while insulating the courtroom record from distortion — a balance still incomplete.

Advancing open justice

• Virtual access: streaming lets litigants, students and journalists witness constitutional hearings directly, reducing dependence on second-hand accounts.
• Institutional accountability: a recorded proceeding creates an authentic official record against which reporting can be checked [1].

The risk it creates

• Oral observations are tentative thinking, not the judgment, yet short clips circulate as verdicts.
• A three-judge Bench headed by CJI Surya Kant held that falsely inserting words into, or misattributing, remarks from live-streamed hearings can amount to a criminal offence, not merely contempt — the plea arose from a lawyer alleging reputational harm from a circulated clip [2].

Safeguards built into the policy

• Exclusion at source: matrimonial matters, sexual offence and gender-based violence cases are kept off the stream; the Court Master must notify parties in advance so objections can be raised [1].
• Restricted downstream use: orders of 24 and 31 July 2026 barred unauthorised use and monetisation of raw or edited hearing clips [2].
• Graded liability: unauthorised use is treated as contempt; deliberate fabrication is pushed into ordinary criminal law [2].

Where the balance strains

• Contempt is a weak, slow remedy — six months/₹2,000 maximum, a one-year limitation, and truth as a defence [3]; the Law Commission nonetheless found no need to amend the Act, since contempt power flows from the Constitution itself [4].

The policy's strength lies in transparency; its weakness is enforcement against decentralised circulation. The durable answer is procedural — prompt release of certified recordings and transcripts, swift takedown of doctored clips, and a written order distinguishing careless paraphrase from deliberate fabrication — so that openness and judicial dignity reinforce, rather than trade against, each other.