Delhi High Court's Right to be Forgotten

The Delhi High Court has issued a significant judgment on the right to be forgotten, creating a framework for masking personal identifiers in court orders and restricting their discoverability online. The ruling in the case of Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India addresses the challenge of personal information in judicial records remaining accessible long after legal proceedings have concluded, according to an analysis published by The Bar Bulletin and edited by Medianama.

This judgment recognizes the right to be forgotten as an aspect of informational privacy under Article 21 of India's Constitution. The court's framework permits the masking of personal identifiers within court orders, restricts name-based discoverability across legal databases and search engines, and directs the de-indexing of these masked judicial records and related news reporting from name-based search results.

Court Orders as Public Records

Judicial records serve a unique constitutional function as authoritative public documents. The principle of open justice requires these records to remain publicly accessible, subject only to narrow exceptions. Indian law already recognizes masking or anonymity in specific statutory circumstances, such as for victims of sexual offences under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, and the POCSO Act.

Within this existing framework, anonymization rather than deletion is seen as a proportionate remedy. It preserves the precedential value of court records and public access while protecting individuals from reputational harm. Source-level anonymization provides a sustainable solution. Once a judicial record is anonymized at its origin, downstream legal databases and search engines can reflect that change without requiring repeated individual takedown interventions.

Section 17(1)(b) of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) provides an exemption for the processing of personal data by any court or tribunal. This reinforces the special character of judicial processing, removing it from the consent-centric architecture of the broader data protection law.

The Missing Journalistic Exemption

The judgment also directs the de-indexing of associated news reports and archives based on court developments. This raises distinct constitutional questions concerning journalistic speech. News reports are contemporaneous accounts of events, prepared in exercise of freedoms protected by Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution. A report concerning an arrest or prosecution may have been accurate and lawful at the time of publication. A subsequent acquittal does not retroactively render the original facts misleading.

The real concern is often the absence of contextual updates rather than the existence of historical reporting itself. The Supreme Court has previously held that once information forms part of public records, including court records, the right to privacy no longer subsists in respect of such information. Earlier drafts of India's data protection legislation contemplated explicit protections for journalistic activities, but these were omitted from the final enacted DPDP Act.

Without a statutory balancing test between privacy and press freedoms, judicial orders may result in what critics call inadvertent censorship. De-indexing fair reporting on criminal proceedings, especially when updated with acquittal facts, suppresses historical and archival truth. Broadly applied de-indexing orders risk erasing the public history necessary for a transparent democracy.

Implementation and Appeal

The judgment has tried to differentiate between different types of platforms. It distinguishes between a court's internal records, online legal databases, and search engines that index judicial records. The court has also differentiated the relief of de-indexing from the relief of masking. De-indexing operates at the level of the search engine or legal database platform, while masking operates at the level of the court records themselves.

The court requires the unredacted version of court orders to remain available for internal records. Legal databases such as Indian Kanoon are required to restrict name-based search functionality within their platforms for the petitioners' records. Search engines are directed to de-index the masked judgments from name-based search results across all platforms and domains.

Indian Kanoon, a prominent legal database, has since appealed to the Division Bench of the Delhi High Court. It is challenging the operational implementation of the Single Bench's directions. This development underscores the urgency for a legally coherent right to be forgotten framework under Indian law. The Supreme Court of India is also examining the issue in another petition filed by Indian Express against Nitin Bhatnagar, which is currently pending.