HC seeks Sunita Kejriwal’s response on plea to remove ‘recordings’ of court proceedings concerning Delhi CM

On Tuesday, the senior counsel appearing for Sunita Kejriwal submitted before a division bench of Acting Chief Justice Manmohan and Justice Tushar Rao Gedela that his client be “dropped” as a party from the “proceedings”.

“The issue is very short. There was a proceeding before the trial court, which was a virtual hearing and anybody could attend through the web. Somebody had recorded that court proceeding and put it on the web on different social media platforms. Respondent No 1 (Sunita Kejriwal) has only (reshared) the post. It is not a post that they say is edited or manipulated… This is not contempt or defamation. This is a PIL,” her counsel said.

Her counsel further said she was not the originator of the alleged audio/video recording and that the person was someone else. “How am I concerned? Dragging people when they have nothing to do with it,” he said. He further submitted that while he was not against the PIL proceeding further, his client be dropped as a party from the proceedings.

At this stage, the bench said that he could move an appropriate application in this regard, however, “court proceedings cannot be on the net”.

“The problem is the anonymity of the net… There is already a notice issued and an interim order is passed. We will have to deal with the matter. You file a counter (reply),” the bench orally said.

The bench also noted the contention of the counsel appearing for the respondents that the “copy of the writ petition served upon them does not tally with the writ petition filed in the court”.

The HC asked the petitioner to supply another copy of the petition to the counsel for the respondents during the day. The bench then permitted the respondents to file their “counter affidavits and/or applications” within four weeks and listed the matter on October 7.

The court also asked the petitioner to file an amended memo of parties, after taking note of the contention of Meta’s counsel that the nomenclature of respondent 8 in the petition should be Meta Platforms Inc and that Instagram is not an independent entity and should be dropped from the array of parties.

The counsel for Meta additionally said that it was not possible for the platform to comply with the vacation bench’s direction to ensure that the content is not re-uploaded. To this, the bench asked the counsel to file an appropriate application addressing the issue.

The petitioner, advocate Vaibhav Singh, had moved the HC contending that when the CM, who had been arrested in the excise policy case, was produced before the trial court on March 28 he had addressed the court in person.

He had earlier argued that certain persons had recorded the trial court proceedings from that day and had posted it on social media platforms. He had alleged that this post of the audio-video recording had been “reposted” by Sunita Kejriwal and other respondents, adding that “unauthorised recording of proceedings by any person or entity is a violation of Delhi High Court Video Conferencing Rules, 2021”.

Apart from removal from the platforms, Singh has additionally prayed for setting up an SIT to conduct an investigation and to identify the individuals responsible for recording and sharing the audio/video recording.