NEW DELHI: Laying emphasis on the fact that “live streaming of court proceedings has a flip side as every word spoken by a judge is in the public realm,” Chief Justice of India (CJI) DY Chandrachud on Saturday batted for the need to control the funny stuff related to courts going on YouTube.Terming the proceedings before courts as “extremely serious”, the judge while addressing the inauguration ceremony of Neutral Citation for the Indian Judiciary and National Conference on Digitisation in Bhubaneswar said judges also need to be trained.
“Today most high courts are doing live streaming on YouTube… you have these little clips about a judge in Patna HC asking an IAS officer as to why he was not appropriately dressed in a suit as opposed to being dressed only in a shirt and a trouser. Or somebody in the Gujarat High Court saying something about why a lawyer is not ready with her cases. So, a lot of funny stuff is going on the YouTube which we need to control,” the CJI said.
On awareness among judges with regard to live streaming, the CJI said, “What happens in court is extremely serious stuff. The live streaming that we are doing has a flip side. We as judges need to be trained ourselves because in the age of social media, every word that we say in court is up in the public realm which we realise when we are hearing the constitution bench arguments. Very often citizens don’t realise that what you say in the course of hearing a case is to open up a dialogue. It doesn’t reflect what you may ultimately decide in a given case but people don’t understand. Live streaming or interface with social media places new demands on us as judges but we need to create robust cloud infrastructure for live streaming,” the CJI said.
The Chief Justice of India in his address also appealed to chief justices of the high courts to not disband infrastructure for virtual hearings. The CJI said, “When the Parliamentary Standing Committee of the Department of Justice visited various HCs, they found that so much of the technology infrastructure which has been set up is obsolete in the sense that it’s not being used by the HCs at all…”
Referring to his vision of “pitchforking technology”, the CJI said it was not for placing it at some silo away from the citizens but to ensure using it for reaching out to common citizens. Lauding the setting up of virtual courts across districts in Orissa to enable lawyers to present their cases before Orissa High Court, the CJI said that this obliterated the need for setting up of the benches of HC.