Examine the tension between preventing misuse of judicial livestreams and upholding the citizen's right to information under Article 19(1)(a).

Live-streaming, permitted by Swapnil Tripathi v. Supreme Court of India (2018) as an extension of open justice under Articles 21 and 145(4) [4], has thrown up a fresh question — who may re-circulate the footage. The Supreme Court's interim order of 24 July 2026 and its proposed archive-access protocol place institutional dignity and the citizen's right to know in direct tension.

The case for regulating misuse

• Decontextualised clips: the interim order bars extraction, monetisation, re-posting and modification of proceedings without permission of the Secretary General or Registrar Generals [3], responding to edited videos that misrepresent tentative judicial remarks.
• Privacy and dignity: the draft Model Rules for Live-Streaming (e-Committee, 2021) already exclude matrimonial disputes, gender-based violence and child-related cases [1][2].
• Fair trial: viral clips of sub judice matters risk trial by social media.
• Legal basis: courts control their own record, and Article 19(2) permits reasonable restrictions.

The case for open access

• Article 19(1)(a) covers the right to receive information; the Court itself framed access to live proceedings as part of access to justice [4].
• A blanket prior-permission regime is overbroad — it treats verbatim sharing like doctored content; RTI activists Anjali Bhardwaj and Amrita Johri argue it reverses open justice [3].
• Chilling effect: journalists and civil society rely on unedited footage for accountability reporting; permission becomes pre-censorship.
• Archive-only access risks gatekeeping — delays and uneven digital capacity across High Courts could ration a public record.

Reconciling the two

• Penalise manipulation, not circulation: act against doctored or monetised clips while allowing faithful, attributed sharing.
• Maintain a free, watermarked, promptly-updated official archive with a time-stamped download facility, plus an appeal against refusal.
• Secure uniform adoption of the Model Rules by all High Courts [2].

The conflict is not transparency versus dignity but calibration between them. A narrowly tailored protocol — authenticating footage rather than restricting audiences — would preserve both judicial credibility and the constitutional promise that justice is not only done but seen to be done.