Virtual Hearing: SC Issues New Standard Operation Procedure For Lawyers And Party-in-Persons [Read Guidelines]

The Supreme Court of India has introduced and directed the implementation of a new Standard Operating Procedure for advocates and parties appearing in person to ease the process of e-filing, mentioning, listing and hearing of matters through video conferencing for the duration of the summer vacations i.e. 18th May 2020 to 19th June 2020. The fresh guidelines have come as a replacement of those that were put in place via circulars dated 23rd March 2020, 26th March 2020 and 17th April, 2020 reiterating and further elaborating the Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for e-filing, mentioning, listing and hearing of matters through video conferencing/tele-conferencing that was already in place. As per the new SOP, fresh matters that could not be listed due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic will be listed for hearing before the Hon'ble Virtual Court. In addition to that short matters will be listed for hearing after, the pool of fresh matters is exhausted. Any other matters as directed may also be listed as well. A schedule of publication of the cause list has been put in place with each cause list notifying the time at which the respective Hon'ble Virtual Courts will be sitting. For the purpose of joining video-conferencing/ tele-conferencing for hearing of listed matters, the Advocate-on-Record/Party-in-Person has specify as to whether he would link to the Hon'ble Bench through own Desktop/Laptop Computer or would prefer to avail the facility for video-conferencing in the Supreme Court premises. The web-link for joining the video-conference shall be provided to the Advocate-on-Record registered at the time of the AOR Code Generation whereas for a Party-in-Person the weblink shall be provided on the e-mail id and/or mobile number mentioned at the time of filing the petition. In the event an Advocate-on-Record requires a Senior Advocate or an arguing counsel to appear and conduct the hearing and/or a litigant to view the proceedings, the concerned Advocate-on-Record shall indicate the contact details like name, e-mail id and mobile number of the Senior Advocate/Arguing Counsel and the litigant through e-mail on the e-mail id video.conference@sci.nic.in. In matters of urgency, the Advocate-on-Record/ Party-in-person shall file the petition/ miscellaneous application, preferably through the e-filing mode available on the Supreme Court website, as per procedure elaborated at the link Upon completion of all the formalities and upon due registration, the Advocate-on-Record/ Party-in-person is permitted to send separately the signed and verified mentioning-application containing a synopsis of urgency not exceeding one page. The mentioning-application shall be submitted only by e-mail at the email address mention.sc@sci.nic.in Mentioning applications received by 2 PM on a particular day shall be processed for listing in the cause-list to be published immediately thereafter, as per the afore-mentioned schedule, subject to availability of the concerned Bench and approval of the Competent Authority. The mentioning-applications received thereafter would be processed for listing in the cause list on the next scheduled day of publishing of the cause-list. Matters involving extreme urgency shall be dealt with in accordance with the established guidelines already published on the official website of the Apex Court at the link At present, the matters shall be heard by the Hon'ble Bench through web-based video-conferencing system on the VIDYO platform hosted on the servers of National Data Centre of National Informatics Centre, Govt. of India and in case the video conferencing is not functional, through tele-conferencing. The smooth functioning of the video-conference is squarely dependent upon and subject to the connectivity [signal strength/ bandwidth] available at the end of the remote user(s), and hence it is expected that any party joining a video-conference hearing shall ensure robust connectivity and bandwidth are available at their end – in this regard, parties may use broadband connection of minimum 2 mbps/dedicated 4G data connection, and may also ensure that no other device or application is connected to or using the bandwidth when the hearing by video-conferencing is progressing on their Vidyo-enabled computer. For ease-of-use, the following Standard Operating Procedure in respect of hearing of cases through video-conferencing mode has been implemented: 1. To join video conferencing on VIDYO platform, parties are required to download VIDYO DESKTOP application from the site on their laptop or desktop on any compatible operating system. 2. Similarly, parties may join the video conferencing on VIDYO platform by downloading the VIDYO MOBILE application in a compatible mobile device (phone or tablet) either from Google Play Store (Android device) or from Apple APP Store(iOS device), on the same...

Virtual Hearing: SC Issues New Standard Operation Procedure For Lawyers And Party-in-Persons [Read Guidelines]

Nilashish Chaudhary

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