The “right to be forgotten” is acquiring a distinct place in India's constitutional privacy jurisprudence. A Division Bench of the Delhi High Court recently raised concerns about whether a blanket restriction on name-based accessibility of judicial records was necessary and whether it could potentially be addressed on a case-by-case basis by the court concerned. Even the Supreme Court is also seized of a similar issue and has indicated the need to delineate the contours and parameters of the right to be forgotten. Against this rapidly developing jurisprudence lies a narrower but significant question: Should an accused who has been finally acquitted after a positive judicial finding that he or she did not commit the offence (Honourable Acquittal) be treated differently, for the purpose of the right to be forgotten, from a person acquitted merely because the prosecution failed to establish guilt beyond reasonable doubt? The answer should be yes.

The case for a distinction deserves serious constitutional consideration because a person completely exonerated after a full-fledged trial should not necessarily be condemned to carry the digital shadow of an accusation for the rest of his life, which has the potential to harm his reputation as well as be a hurdle to his professional aspirations.

Positive Exoneration but still Digital Permanence

The digital world creates a peculiar form of post-acquittal harm.

A criminal allegation which once existed in a newspaper archive or a physical court file can now remain permanently searchable. A prospective employer, educational institution, business associate or even an acquaintance can discover the allegation within seconds by entering a person's name into a search engine. The acquittal may appear in the judgment. Yet the accusation may remain the most visible association generated by the search. This is particularly troubling where the court has affirmatively found that the accused did not commit the offence.

The Karnataka High Court's recent decision concerning an honourably acquitted person illustrates this concern. The Court recognised that continued online identification, even after honourable acquittal, may undermine the practical value of the judicial determination and may justify masking in appropriate circumstances. So, when the criminal justice system has finally exonerated a person, there is no need to allow the digital ecosystem to continue indefinitely to present that person primarily through the lens of the accusation.

Need for Recognition of Honourable acquittal: Does The Reason For Acquittal Matter?

Indian criminal law does not formally divide acquittals into statutory categories of “honourable acquittal”, “clean acquittal” and “acquittal by benefit of doubt”. The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognised this position. Yet, in March 2026, while considering the consequences of acquittal in the context of public employment, the Court explained that an “honourable acquittal” may describe a case where, after a full appreciation of evidence, the court reaches a definitive conclusion that the accused did not commit the offence. That is materially different from an acquittal resulting from a lacuna in the prosecution case or insufficiency of evidence or even inadmissibility of evidence due to technical defects.

An acquittal may result because a prosecution witness turned hostile, an essential ingredient of the offence was not established, evidence was inadmissible or insufficient, a procedural requirement was not satisfied, or the prosecution otherwise failed to cross the threshold of proof beyond reasonable doubt.

In another case, however, the court may, after examining the evidence, record a positive finding that the accused was falsely implicated or that the prosecution story is demonstrably inconsistent with the evidence.

Both cases end in acquittal. Their legal consequence in the criminal proceeding is the same: there is no conviction. But the factual character of the judicial determination may be different. This view finds support in the recent judgment of Rajasthan High Court which highlighted the importance of terms used while recording an accused's acquittal where the prosecution failed miserably to establish guilt, and it went on to order that when there is no evidence against an accused, the judgment of honourable acquittal be passed to restore dignity instead of just mentioning “benefit of doubt,” as it may carry adverse implications in acquitted persons' future professional aspirations.

In fact, a LiveLaw article specially highlights the need for recognition of honourable acquittal through an amendment in criminal law. That difference can legitimately matter when deciding whether permanent name-based digital dissemination is proportionate.

A Constitutional Classification, Not A New Criminal Verdict

The proposed approach need not require Parliament to amend the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita or create a new category of acquittal. The criminal judgment would continue to record an acquittal. However, a special mention of the term “Honourable acquittal” in the judgment could instead function as a limited constitutional classification for post-acquittal informational-privacy purposes.

Four considerations that may assist a court in concluding whether an acquittal is honourable, which in turn provide an objective basis for subsequent masking or de-indexing, are:

Positive exoneration: Does the judgment expressly or substantively find that the accused did not commit the offence, rather than merely hold that guilt was not proved?

Nature of the prosecution: Does the evidence disclose false implication, fabrication, malicious prosecution, vexatious litigation or abuse of process?

Continuing public interest: Is there a legitimate and continuing public interest in identifying the acquitted person?

Digital harm: Does continued name-based discoverability cause disproportionate interference with privacy, dignity, reputation or professional opportunities?

The trial court, having directly examined the evidence and the witnesses, is ordinarily better placed to come to a reasonable conclusion than a search engine, legal database or later court unfamiliar with the evidentiary record to identify the nature of the acquittal. Where the trial court itself records a categorical finding of innocence, then in appropriate cases, the court could order that his name, address, and other identifying particulars should be masked or de-indexed from publicly accessible records, subject to law. Otherwise, a complainant who initiated a malicious prosecution may effectively succeed in causing lasting reputational and professional harm, even after losing the case. An innocent person should not be condemned to carry the stigma of a false accusation for the rest of his life merely because he was once made a part of a criminal trial.

But “Honourable Acquittal” Cannot Mean Neither Automatic Erasure nor Complete Destruction.

Open justice is a constitutional value. There may be cases in which continued identification serves a legitimate purpose: where the individual occupies a position of public trust, where regulatory consequences continue, where substantial public funds are involved, or where the person's identity remains genuinely relevant to an issue of public concern. The appropriate constitutional response, therefore, should not be automatic erasure.

It could instead be a strong but rebuttable presumption in favour of masking or de-indexing where a final judgment contains a clear positive exonerative finding.

Also, the remedy need not involve destroying a judgment. It may involve masking the individual's name and identifying particulars in the publicly accessible version, de-indexing the judgment from name-based searches, or preserving access through the case number or citation.

The law may preserve the judgment, but justice need not preserve the accusation as a lifelong digital scar.

Comparative Resonance: Italy

The proposed distinction is not conceptually alien to comparative criminal law.

Italian criminal law recognises different forms of acquittal in the form of “Assoluzione Con Formula Piena” under Article 530 of the Italian Code of Criminal Procedure (Codice Di Procedura Penale), which includes acquittal based on a complete formula (Honourable acquittal) under para 1 and acquittal where the evidence is insufficient to establish guilt under para 2 of the Article.

The Italian model is relevant not because India must replicate it, but because it demonstrates that the fact of acquittal and the reason for acquittal can be analytically distinguished. Indian constitutional law can develop its own framework based on Article 21, informational privacy, dignity and proportionality.

A “Fresh Start” Is Not Unknown To Indian Law

Indian law already recognises, in a different context, that certain persons should not be permanently defined by their interaction with the criminal justice system. Section 24 of the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 embodies the principle of a “fresh start” by restricting disclosure and retention of records concerning children in conflict with the law.

The adult context is obviously different. Yet the underlying constitutional intuition is relevant. If the legal system recognises that an encounter with criminal proceedings should not permanently define a child's future, there is a legitimate question whether an adult who has undergone a rigmarole of the criminal trial and has been positively exonerated should remain permanently searchable through the accusation itself.

The Way Forward

The developing High Court jurisprudence now presents a more specific question of whether the nature of an acquittal should influence the constitutional assessment of continued digital identification.

The answer need not disturb the settled proposition that an acquittal is an acquittal in criminal law. Instead, courts could recognise a narrower proposition: where a final criminal judgment contains a clear positive finding that the accused did not commit the offence and the trial court makes a categorical mention to that effect by using the term “Honourable acquittal”, that finding is a significant factor in assessing whether continued name-based digital dissemination is proportionate under Article 21. Such a framework would preserve open justice while recognising the perpetual digital stigma.

The judgment should remain part of legal history. But an accusation that ends in honourable acquittal need not become a person's permanent digital identity.

Author is an Advocate practicing at High Court of Karnataka. Views are personal.