India prides herself as the largest democracy in the world. There are three broad pillars of Indian democracy: the legislatures who make laws, the executives who enforce laws and the judiciary that interprets laws. The laws regulate a number of activities like criminal offense, civil cases, taxation, trade, social welfare, education and labor rights.
Even when laws empower citizens in a large number of ways, a significant fraction of the population is completely ignorant of their rights and privileges. As a result, common people are afraid of going to police and rarely go to court to seek justice. People continue to live under fear of unknown laws and a corrupt police.
A number of attempts have been made to bring the knowledge of law to the common people. The Government of India took active efforts to present all laws along with their amendments at indiacode.nic.in and all court judgments at judis.nic.in. Similar efforts have been taken up by other privately owned websites.
While it is commendable to make law documents available to common people, it is still quite difficult for common people to easily find the required information. The first problem is that acts are very large and in most scenarios just a few section of laws are applicable. Finding most applicable sections from hundreds of pages of law documents is too daunting for common people. Secondly, laws are often vague and one needs to see how they have been interpreted by the judicial courts. Currently, the laws and judgments are separately maintained and to find judgments that interpret certain law clauses is difficult.
In order to remove the above two structural problems, Indian Kanoon is started. It achieves them by breaking law documents into smallest possible clause and by integrating law/statutes with court judgments. A tight integration of court judgments with laws and with themselves allows automatic determination of the most relevant clauses and court judgments. Hope Indian Kanoon helps you in your search for Indian laws and their interpretations.
Why is my court case on the Internet?
Why is google/yahoo showing Indian Kanoon judgments?
Indian Kanoon has been pretty useful for people seeking information on Indian Law. Over time Indian Kanoon reputation on general search engines like google and yahoo improved and as a result pages from Indian Kanoon started surfacing in the top few of search results. So one completely inadvertent thing that happened was that people would go on google/yahoo and type someone's name and see the indiankanoon court judgment related to that person.
Court Cases Are Public Records
Court judgments are public records. If a case is heard by the Supreme Court of India, no one would argue that the opinion should not be published and viewable by all. The decisions of the Supreme Court are the law of the land, and all citizens must be able to read their decisions.
Not just Indian Kanoon, most courts today are publishing their opinions on the Internet. If you search for a current court case from judis.nic.in or high court website, you will find that case on the Internet directly from the courts.
Can you remove my court case?
We will not remove any public documents without a court order. Remember, there are many, many copies of these court decisions in existence, and Indian Kanoon has just one of those many copies. If you want information deleted, your only recourse is with the courts that issued the opinion. You should contact the court directly or hire a lawyer to do so for you.
Can you at least block Google/Yahoo from accessing my judgment?
Yes but only for cases of divorce, maintainence and child custody if it significantly impacts your life. The cases from Supreme Court will not be blocked. Send an email to webmaster@indiankanoon.com with the relevant details.
0 comments:
Post a Comment