Open justice has traditionally required courts to function in public view, ensuring accountability and public confidence in the administration of justice. However, the digital transformation of judicial records has fundamentally altered the consequences of open justice. As a result of the growing presence of court websites, search engines, and legal databases, judicial records have become permanently available on the digital space. As a consequence, participation in litigation may expose an individual to lifelong digital identification, irrespective of the outcome of the proceedings.

Therefore, the challenge today is not whether justice should remain open, but whether such openness requires litigants to remain identifiable even after the judicial proceedings have concluded. This issue sits at the confluence of two fundamental legal mandates: the principle of open justice inherited from common law, and the right to informational privacy enshrined under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution.

Recently, the Delhi High Court in Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India, made an attempt to reconcile these inherently contradicting legal principles through anonymisation, masking and de-indexing. Rather than treating privacy and transparency as mutually exclusive, the Court evolved a framework that seeks to preserve both.

Open Justice and its constitutional limits

"Open justice" is the cornerstone of our judicial system. It rests on the maxim that justice must not only be done, but must be seen to be done. This transparency ensures public scrutiny of the judiciary while also maintaining confidence in the courts. It is codified in the Code of Criminal Procedure, 19733 (and preserved in Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 20234) for criminal proceedings and the Code of Civil Procedure, 19085 for civil proceedings.

Exception of Anonymity

The principle of open justice is subject to reasonable restrictions, and is not absolute. While public hearings are the norm, courts retain inherent power to restrict publication where the administration of justice so demands. Recently, the Punjab & Haryana High Court in the case of Rohit Mehta held that the right to information is subservient to the right to life and dignity under Article 21 of the Constitution, and observed that the "right of a victim to remain anonymous cannot be allowed to be sacrificed at the altar of right to information". Anonymity, therefore, emerges as a necessary exception to protect the most vulnerable stakeholders in the justice system.

Judicial Anonymisation as an exception to Open Justice

Indian courts have specifically dealt with certain categories of offenses / disputes where anonymity is a statutory, or judicial mandate. For instance:

1. Sexual Offenses: Under the Indian Penal Code, 18608 (now Section 72 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023), disclosing the identity of a rape survivor is a criminal offense. The judiciary, in landmark cases such as State of Punjab v. Gurmit Singh and Nipun Saxena v. Union of India, established that FIRs in such cases must not be uploaded on public portals, and trials must be conducted in-camera.

2. Juvenile Justice: The Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 and the POCSO Act, 2012, impose a complete bar on disclosing identifying information of children involved in legal proceedings.

3. Matrimonial Disputes: Unlike the strict liability in criminal cases, matrimonial anonymity often falls under judicial discretion. For instance, the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, permits in-camera proceedings to protect family privacy.

4. Right to Be Forgotten: Emerging from Article 21, courts have increasingly directed legal aggregators to de-index judgments to protect acquitted or vulnerable litigants from digital exposure.

While these categories appear diverse, they are united by a common objective: preventing unnecessary identification of individuals where disclosure serves little public purpose and carries a disproportionate risk of harm.

Laksh Vir Singh Yadav - Recalibrating open justice in the digital age

A significant contribution of Laksh Vir Singh Yadav lies in its recognition that the harm suffered by an individual occurs not merely from the existence of judicial records, but from the effortless discoverability through search engines and legal databases. To address this concern, the Delhi High Court developed a dual remedial framework i. e. de-indexing and masking, treating them as complementary mechanisms that operate at different levels.

De-indexing operates at the level of search engines and legal databases. It prevents specific judgments from appearing in name-based search results without deleting or altering the underlying record. The judgment remains accessible through case numbers, citations and other targeted searches; what is curtailed is the ability of a person's name to function as a permanent retrieval key for every interaction with the legal system.

Masking operates at the level of the judicial record itself. It requires the court registry to replace names and identifying particulars in publicly accessible digital versions of judgments with neutral references such as "ABC" or "XYZ". Crucially, the complete unredacted version continues to be preserved in the court's records and remains accessible to courts, parties, advocates and authorities with a legitimate purpose.

The Court expressly recognised that these remedies are not alternatives, but cumulative safeguards. De-indexing addresses the problem of “digital amplification” by search engines, while masking addresses identifiability at its source within the judicial record. Together, they reduce digital exposure without compromising on their transparency or accountability. The Court also recognised that masking and de-indexing are cumulative, rather than alternative remedies, each addressing a different source of identifiability. In doing so, the Court drew an important distinction between public accessibility and unrestricted digital discoverability, holding that while open justice requires judicial records to remain available, it does not require individuals to remain indefinitely searchable through their names.

The practical limits of anonymisation were subsequently illustrated by the Supreme Court in X v. Y, where the Court clarified that anonymised decrees may coexist with unredacted copies issued for use before statutory authorities. Although procedural in nature, the decision reinforces the principle that privacy protections must not impede the practical implementation of judicial orders.

Jigsaw Identification and the DPDP Act

Traditionally, courts protected privacy by suppressing a litigant's name or substituting it with initials or pseudonyms. In the earlier era of limited public dissemination, such measures were often sufficient to preserve anonymity. Today, anonymity may be defeated even without the disclosure of a person's name.

This is commonly described as "jigsaw identification" and occurs when multiple innocuous pieces of information are assembled to reveal an individual's identity. A judgment may omit names while retaining details relating to a litigant's profession, city of residence, family details, educational background, etc. These facts, though appear harmless in isolation, can collectively enable identification by employers, acquaintances, journalists, or online communities.

This phenomenon highlights an important shift in the understanding of privacy. The concern is no longer confined to preventing the disclosure of a person's name; rather, it extends to preventing the disclosure of information that renders an individual identifiable. This distinction finds legislative recognition in the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023. The Act defines "personal data" as any data about an individual who is identifiable by or in relation to such data. The emphasis is therefore not on direct identifiers alone, but on the broader concept of identifiability itself.

The emerging jurisprudence on de-indexing and the Right to be Forgotten reflects the same underlying concern. Decisions directing masking of personal identifiers or restricting name-based discoverability do not intend to erase judicial history, but rather attempt to limit the ease with which individuals may be identified and permanently associated with sensitive disputes.

Viewed together, the Laksh Vir Singh Yadav case and the X v. Y case reveal two complementary dimensions of modern privacy. One addresses the problem of discoverability by limiting the ease with which individuals can be traced through digital search mechanisms, while the other addresses the problem of usability by ensuring that anonymisation does not impair the practical operation of judicial orders. Both decisions reflect a common judicial concern: preserving individual dignity without sacrificing either transparency or functionality.

The true significance of the Laksh Vir Singh Yadav case lies in its recognition that privacy harms in the digital age arise from discoverability as much as disclosure. The emerging jurisprudence demonstrates that the debate is no longer between openness and secrecy. Rather, it concerns the extent to which judicial transparency requires permanent digital identifiability. The Delhi High Court's approach suggests that these contrary values are capable of coexisting through defined mechanisms such as masking and de-indexing.

Judicial anonymisation therefore ought to be viewed not as an exception to open justice, but as an evolution of it - one that recognises that accountability of institutions need not come at the cost of perpetual exposure of individuals.

References:

1. Laksh Vir Singh Yadav v. Union of India [2026: DHC: 4891]

2. Sahara India Real Estate Corp. Ltd. v. SEBI [AIR 2012 SC 3829]

3. Section 327

4. Section 366

5. Section 153B

6. Naresh Shridhar Mirajkar v. State of Maharashtra (AIR 1967 SC 1)

7. Rohit Mehta v. Punjab and Haryana High Court [2024:PHHC:124565-DB]

8. Section 228A

9. [1996 AIR 1393]

10. AIRONLINE 2018 SC 826

11. Section 74

12. Section 33(7)

13. Section 22

14. Order of Supreme Court dated 05.06.2026 in Misc. Appn. No. 1780 of 2026 in Transfer Petition (Civil) No. 2922 of 2024

Authors are Advocates practicing at Chennai. Views are personal.