BENGALURU: The Karnataka High Court, which was one of the first high courts in the country to provide permanent video conferencing (VC) for hearing cases after the Covid breakout in 2020, suspended the facility and live streaming of court proceedings on Tuesday for cyber security reasons. Miscreants played obscene content in some of the court halls on Monday (Dec 4) afternoon by hacking into Zoom platform.
Though video conference hearings occurred for sometime on Tuesday morning, they were stopped by the high court’s administration after a complaint was filed with the city police. When the division bench of Chief Justice Prasanna B Varale and Justice Krishna S Dixit started the proceedings in the morning, Chief Justice Varale informed litigants and advocates in the court that an unfortunate situation had arisen and live-streaming and video conferencing had to be stopped.
The HC issued a statement, saying, “Since there have been cyber security issues in the High Court for about two days while conducting proceedings in the court halls through VC, due to interception of the proceedings by the unknown miscreants, the High Court of Karnataka has decided to suspend the proceedings of all the three benches of the high court at Bengaluru, Dharwad and Kalaburagi through VC for the time being.”
It said, “It is requested that the advocates, litigants/party-in-persons, media persons, and whoever appears through VC shall opt to appear physically until the VC proceedings are restored with new safeguards.”