Case quashed, name still online: Uttarakhand High Court orders e-Courts ‘masking’

The Uttarakhand High Court has ordered that a software professional’s name be replaced with “ABC” or “XYZ” on the e-Courts website after the criminal proceedings against him were quashed in 2024. The court said keeping a person’s name linked to a judicial record online can cause disproportionate harm to privacy, dignity and reputation where there is no legitimate public interest in doing so.

Justice Alok Mahra was hearing the man’s plea to have his name removed or masked on the e-Courts services website who had approached the high court after finding that he was still shown as an accused in the online record of criminal proceedings in Udham Singh Nagar district, even though the proceedings had already ended.

“The entitlement to masking flows from the same constitutional foundation as the entitlement to de-indexing, that is, the right to informational privacy as a facet of Article 21…The continued association of an individual’s name with a judicial record in the public digital domain causes disproportionate harm to informational privacy, dignity and reputation that is not justified by any legitimate public interest in the eligible categories identified in this judgment,” the court said on September 17.

The petitioner told the court that an FIR had been lodged against him in 2023. After the investigation, a chargesheet was filed and the court took cognisance of the case. A compounding application was later filed, following which the high court quashed the entire proceedings through its order dated June 6, 2024. Yet his name remained on the e-Courts portal.

Justice Alok Mahra noted that masking would keep the full unredacted judgment in the court’s internal records while protecting the petitioner’s identity in the public digital version. (Image enhanced using AI)

What masking means

The high court used the case to explain what it means to mask someone’s identity from an online court record. Masking, it said, means replacing a person’s name and other necessary personal details, such as address and identity information, with a neutral reference in the publicly available digital version of the record. The complete, unredacted record would continue to remain with the court.

The court made it clear that this does not mean deleting a judgment or wiping out the case. “The reasoning, findings, legal conclusions, case number, the court details, date, etc. remain entirely intact and publicly accessible,” the court said.

“A person’s name ceases to function as the searchable key that unlocks the record for casual public access. The record itself, in all its substance, remains accessible to courts, parties, advocates, authorities, and any person who seeks it through purposeful means,” it said.

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The court said the basis for such masking lies in the constitutional protection of informational privacy under Article 21. It also held that the proportionality principle behind the right to be forgotten applies when deciding whether a person’s name should continue to be directly linked to a judicial record online. The court observed that keeping such a link can cause disproportionate harm to a person’s informational privacy, dignity and reputation where such association is not justified by a legitimate public interest.

“Masking gives that determination its full effect at the level of the court record itself. In cases of settlement, the consensual extinguishment of the proceedings by the complainant removes any basis for the continued association of the individual’s name with the record,” it added.

Masking vs de-indexing

Distinguishing masking and indexing, the high court said that unlike de-indexing, which is a direction to a private platform, “masking” would involve a direction to a court or, more precisely, to a court’s registry, to modify the publicly accessible version of its own judicial record.

However, the court also said that masking needs to be considered carefully because it involves asking a court registry to change the publicly accessible version of its own record. Only names and personal identifiers should be masked; the substance of the judgment must remain available.The complete unredacted version must be preserved in the court’s internal records. The masking can apply to records already available online as well as future digitisation or uploading.

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Allowing the petition, the court noted that the proceedings against the petitioner had already been quashed on June 6, 2024, and directed the high court registry and computer branch, along with the district court in Udham Singh Nagar, to remove his actual name from the e-Courts services website.

The court directed that the petitioner’s name be replaced with a pseudonym or neutral reference such as “ABC” or “XYZ” in the digital record of the criminal proceedings registered at a police station in Udham Singh Nagar.