On July 24, the Supreme Court placed the record of its own hearings behind a permission counter. A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana issued an interim direction: live-streamed hearings shall not be extracted, modified, disseminated, reposted, uploaded, or monetised without prior permission. That permission must come from the court’s Secretary General or from the Registrar General of the High Court concerned. The direction came at the stage of notice in Harshita Grover v. Union of India, a writ petition by a journalist. News reporting, the bench clarified, stands unaffected.
Justice Bagchi observed that streaming should be an exception rather than a norm, and that parties should have to pay for it. A court cannot be a round-the-clock entertainment channel, he added. The institution that opened itself to view has begun asking whether the opening was wise.
The right to watch the proceedings of the court online was granted when somebody made the claim outside the courtroom. In 2017, Swapnil Tripathi, then a law student, asked the court to stream proceedings of constitutional importance. He also sought viewing rooms in its premises for those unable to enter. In September 2018, the court agreed. Access to a live broadcast, it held, flows from the right of access to justice under Article 21. It rests also on Article 145(4), which requires judgments to be pronounced in open court.
Eight years on, the question is who may hold the recording. In Swapnil Tripathi, the court had held that a citizen may watch. The latest order adds that she must ask before sharing what she saw.
Jeremy Bentham, the English utilitarian and law reformer, made the case for publicity more sharply than anyone since. He set it out in the Rationale of Judicial Evidence, which John Stuart Mill edited and published in 1827. Secrecy, on his account, gives free rein to what he called sinister interest. He meant the private advantage of the officeholder, pursued at the expense of those he serves. Every check on judicial injustice, he argued, works only to the extent that proceedings are seen. Publicity, Bentham wrote, “keeps the judge himself while trying under trial”. Note the direction of that argument. It runs towards the Bench rather than towards the convenience of spectators. The judge who is watched is the judge who behaves.
Delivering his opinion in Swapnil Tripathi, Justice D.Y. Chandrachud observed that live streaming would make judges conscious of their conduct. Restricting circulation therefore does more than inconvenience viewers. It loosens a check that runs against the institution imposing it.
What the Court itself constructed
Continuous streaming is the court’s own creation. The e-committee circulated Model Rules in June 2021. The Full Court resolved on September 20, 2022, to stream Constitution Bench proceedings. Streaming began a week later, when eight lakh viewers watched three benches in a single day. In October 2024, the court extended streaming to all its courtrooms. No litigant compelled this and no legislature required it. The court presented it as a way of overcoming the barrier of distance.
Those rules answer Justice Bagchi in advance. Rule 5.1 provides that, subject to the exclusions they contain, all proceedings will be streamed. The exclusions are narrow and enumerated. They cover matrimonial and custody matters, sexual offences, POCSO, and juvenile cases, in-camera proceedings and the recording of evidence. Streaming is the norm and closure the exception. Reversing that presumption needs reasons the order does not supply. The e-committee named its audience too: citizens, journalists, civil society, academicians, and law students. Those are the people who must now apply.
In 2024, Former Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud said that live streaming would make judges conscious of their conduct.
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Ragu R
State of Uttar Pradesh v. Mohammad Naim (1963) made it clear that observations not necessary to the decision are not findings. A High Court judge had written that no lawless group in the country matched the criminal record of the state police. The Supreme Court held the observation wholly unwarranted and confirmed the power to expunge it. Judicial pronouncements, the court added, should not depart from “sobriety, moderation, and reserve”. The relief it gave was the removal of a judge’s words, and not a restraint on those who repeated them.
The court has ruled on the neighbouring question as well. In Chief Election Commissioner v. M.R. Vijayabhaskar (2021), the Election Commission asked it to restrain reporting of oral remarks made by the Madras High Court. The court refused. Free speech extends to reporting judicial proceedings, it held, and oral observations form no part of the record. It also counselled judges to weigh their off-the-cuff remarks. Restraint on the bench is what it prescribed. Restraint on the audience is what it declined.
The United Kingdom offers the closest comparison, and the petition invoked it. Both systems restrict what may be done with court footage. They restrict it by different means, and the means are the whole of the matter.
The United Kingdom Supreme Court records and broadcasts all its open proceedings. Its footage is released under a licence, and the user accepts the terms at the point of access. Nobody applies to anybody. The condition is that the footage serve the fair and accurate reporting of the proceedings. That is a standard with a long history in English law, and a user can tell in advance whether he meets it. Liability follows afterwards if he does not. The Indian direction supplies no standard at all. It supplies an office. A standard can be complied with by everyone at once. An office has a queue, a gatekeeper and a discretion.
The recordings of those proceedings are selected for permanent preservation as public records at the National Archives. The restriction on reuse therefore sits on top of a guaranteed archive. The Indian order restricts reuse while asking every High Court whether continuous streaming should continue at all.
In England, filming in court is prohibited by statute, and the Supreme Court’s broadcast is an exception to that prohibition. The openness there is narrow and it is anchored. India has no statute either prohibiting the broadcast or guaranteeing it. Streaming here was granted by a judgment and a resolution of the Full Court, and can be withdrawn by the same body that granted it. India’s openness is wider in reach than the British model and far more precarious in tenure. A British judge who thought streaming had gone too far would have to persuade a legislature. Here it would just require a court order.
The making of a permission regime
On July 22, the same Bench declined urgent listing of a plea alleging police excesses against students of the Cockroach Janta Party. The Chief Justice said the court had no time to watch videos and asked counsel not to waste it. The exchange was streamed and travelled widely. On July 24, he called that reporting reckless. It had missed the context, which was that the court would not hear a matter mentioned at the Bar without the procedure being followed.
Chief Justice of India Justice Surya Kant Sharma arrives during a felicitation ceremony for newly appointed judges of the Supreme Court and various High Courts in New Delhi, July 13, 2026.
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Atul Yadav/PTI
The court’s direction on the same day restricting circulation of its proceedings came at the stage of notice, before any respondent had filed a reply. The petitioner had arrayed the Union through four ministries and the Bar Council of India. She had impleaded no platform and no High Court. The court added them itself, issuing notice to Meta and X and bringing in every High Court on the same day. Those parties were noticed and were not heard. An interim order of general application, made without contest, is a strange instrument for a constitutional question.
Half a century ago, the late Marc Galanter asked why the haves come out ahead. His answer appeared in the Law and Society Review in 1974. The repeat player appears in court often, expects to appear again, and treats each case as one instalment in a long account. The one-shotter appears once, or perhaps twice in a lifetime, and wants only to win. The repeat player can therefore afford to lose a case in order to win a rule. The one-shotter cannot. A permission counter is a forum like any other, and it sorts its users the same way. The repeat player will learn the counter, and can afford to be refused because he will be back. The one-shotter has one clip and one moment.
Courts, Galanter observed, are reactive. They do nothing until somebody asks. A permission counter is reactive in the same way. It serves whoever knows the counter exists, knows which officer to approach, and can wait for an answer. The direction names two offices and stops there. It prescribes no form, no criteria, no timeline, and no appeal. Silence will operate as refusal, because anyone unsure of the position will decline to publish rather than risk contempt.
Consider who can work such a permission counter. A newsroom with a Delhi bureau will learn the practice within a fortnight, and can absorb a week’s delay. A district lawyer in Bastar cannot, nor can a legal aid clinic, a students’ union, or a farmers’ collective. None of them will be prosecuted. They will simply stop circulating what they lawfully watched. That is how a permission regime does its work. Its cost appears as absence, and absence is never reported.
The exemption for news reporting sharpens the problem rather than solving it. The bench did not say who counts as a reporter. India has no register of journalists and no licence to practise journalism. Somebody must therefore decide, case by case, whether an applicant is press. On the terms of this direction, that somebody is a registrar. An officer of the court will determine who may report the court. Whoever clears that hurdle inherits the very filter that Swapnil Tripathi was designed to remove, standing once more between the citizen and the bench.
The litigants who lose most are those the press covers least. Consider the undertrial whose bail application is disposed of in four minutes. No reporter attends, because no point of law arises. Consider the oustee whose land was acquired years ago or the forest dweller evicted without a reasoned order. These hearings go unreported precisely because they are routine, and the routine is what continuous streaming made visible for the first time. For such a litigant, a clip may be the only record his family or his village ever sees. That proceeding settled his life.
The Chief Justice offered his own answer to this in an interview on July 24. Reporting, he said, should turn on new principle and on issues of importance. Above all it should turn on what benefits the underprivileged, so that marginalised communities learn something has been done for them. The aspiration is unimpeachable and the emphasis is welcome. The difficulty is that this describes an editorial policy, and the institution being reported upon is being invited to set it. The choice of what deserves amplification belongs to the reader and to the reporter. It belongs most of all to the litigant, who has the strongest claim of anyone to circulate the recording of his own hearing.
Then comes the question of proportion, which the order does not address at all. What share of the reporting of court proceedings is distorted? The petition offers instances rather than a rate. A restriction of universal reach now rests on a sample nobody counted.
Prompt correction is already within this Court’s reach, and the point is worth pressing because the machinery exists. On April 25, 2024, in the Court’s 75th year, Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud announced a WhatsApp service from the bench. Advocates-on-record, parties in person, and members of the Bar receive automated messages. The Court gave out the number and said the line would take no messages and no calls. The service is one-way by design. The Delhi High Court went further in September 2024: it launched a chatbot that answers queries by case number or party name.
A grievance about being misquoted is legitimate, and a Chief Justice has the same claim to accuracy as anyone else. The remedy for a record read badly is a fuller record: authenticated video, published transcripts, prompt correction. The instrument chosen by the Court borrows instead the logic of the licensing state.
The reconsideration now set in motion will not be settled by whoever wins this petition. Twenty-five High Courts have been asked what continuous streaming has cost them, and each will answer from its own experience of being watched. Some will say the cameras have changed nothing. Others will report what their judges dislike, and a court asked to audit its own exposure tends to find the exposure excessive. Those replies will form the record on which the question is decided, and no citizen has been asked to contribute to it. That is the more lasting difficulty. A right that was recognised in 2018 on the reasoning of a Bench may be narrowed now on the returns of a survey, and surveys of institutions record what institutions feel rather than what the public has lost.
V. Venkatesan is a Contributing Editor at Supreme Court Observer. The views are his own.
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