India Kanoon challenges Delhi HC ruling recognising ‘right to be forgotten’, says it undermines open justice

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The appeal challenged the single-judge judgment that allowed individuals to seek removal of personal information from search engine results, including legal databases, where such information is ‘no longer relevant or serves no legitimate public purpose’

Published - July 14, 2026 04:42 pm IST - NEW DELHI

Delhi High Court. | Photo Credit: KSL

Legal database platform India Kanoon has approached the Delhi High Court on Tuesday (July 14, 2026) challenging its recent judgment recognising the “right to be forgotten”, arguing that the ruling failed to “strike a careful balance between the right to information and the principle of open justice”.

The appeal came up for hearing before a Bench of Chief Justice D.K. Upadhyaya and Justice Tejas Karia. Appearing for the platform, advocate Naman Kumar sought a short adjournment in view of lawyers abstaining from work. The Bench listed the matter for further hearing on July 21.

The appeal challenged the single-judge judgment of May 29, 2026 that allowed individuals to seek removal of personal information from search engine results, including legal databases, where such information is “no longer relevant or serves no legitimate public purpose”. The judgment also laid down a framework governing de-indexing of judicial records from search engines and masking of personal identifiers from publicly accessible court records.

In the plea filed through advocate Indumugi C., India Kanoon has argued that the single-judge ruling has framed an arbitrary standard for de-indexing and disabling name-based searches. “Litigants claiming ‘privacy’ from search engines and legal databases have to prove that the information contained therein is no longer relevant and serves no legitimate public purpose. However, the factors of “relevance” and “legitimate public purpose” are arbitrary, broad, and unclear,” the plea argued.

Continued public function

India Kanoon further argued that “judicial and public records serve a continuing public function and cannot be obliterated merely based on individual request”.

It argued that while the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in K.S. Puttaswamy case recognised the right to privacy as an intrinsic part of the right to life, it did not establish a “right to be forgotten” in the Indian context.

“The mere fact that there was a brief discussion by way of obiter in Puttaswamy about the right to be forgotten is insufficient to be the legal basis for extending a ‘right to be forgotten’ to individual litigants,” the plea said.

Indian Kanoon said it is a free legal database that provides access to Indian laws (both Central and State), reported and unreported judgements, daily orders of the Supreme Court, High Courts, and various tribunals.

The platform’s users most commonly enter party names to find and apply cases. Such users include litigants, students, researchers, lawyers, and even judges themselves. “If individual litigants are given the impetus to seek deletion of their names, i.e., redaction of case names from the petitioner’s database, it has a direct adverse impact on the usability and utility of the petitioner’s legal search engine, thereby impairing the petitioner’s freedom to carry out its business,” it added.

The single-judge ruling came while hearing over 30 petitions filed by a diverse group of individuals, including persons who had been acquitted of criminal charges, parties to matrimonial disputes, persons whose proceedings had been quashed or settled, and individuals whose names appeared incidentally in judicial records.

The petitioners shared a common grievance that the continued availability and name-based searchability of judicial records bearing their names in the digital public domain causes “disproportionate and continuing harm to their reputations, dignity, and life prospects”.

The single-judge ruling held “that persons, who have been acquitted, discharged, or whose proceedings have been quashed are entitled to have that legal determination reflected in their digital identity/persona”.

Published - July 14, 2026 04:42 pm IST

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