Dear all, Thank you for signing the petition and joining the campaign towards strengthening our democracy! On 9th February 2018, the Supreme Court has agreed to hear my petition to allow live-streaming on its merits. The Court has now sought assistance of the Attorney General of India to assist the court in the consequent hearings on the matter. To help the Attorney General K.K Venugopal to assist in the case, the court directed that the petitions should be sent to the Central agency, which conducts litigation on behalf of ministries and departments of the Central government in the top court. Keeping in mind that every word in the court cannot be made available in the public domain, I submitted that there could be a provision for editing or other alternatives of the video recording, prior to publishing. Measures to maintain the privacy in sensitive matters can be sought. Different constitutional courts deal with the issue differently – like the International Court of Justice permits video recordings to be published only 30 minutes after the arguments; while some courts do it simultaneously. I also submitted before the Hon’ble court, that my plea is for video recording for cases of national importance exclusively, which implies the matters that have been referred to the Constitutional bench. Several significant matters such as the Aadhaar, Golrookh Gupta, Section 377 Indian Penal Code, criminalization of adultery to name a few should be recorded. Keeping in view our right to seek information, under our right of freedom of speech and expression, I will be arguing the case next month for further hearing. Following the hearing, the petition received the support and large coverage from the media and rightly so, as it impacts all of us. The news of the petition is on our mainstream media such as NDTV, Outlook, Scroll, thewire, and the hearings will be closely watched. Awareness to increase transparency in the courtrooms and the petition was signed, shared and supported by politicians like Shashi Tharoor, and social activists such as Vrinda Grover, Aakar Patel from Amnesty International to name a few. Most importantly, I have personally met litigants who have expressed support to video recording in their own ongoing cases. This online petition has received an over-whelming support from the people of the country, and is now close to 1-lakh signatures because of your support. We will soon be presenting the signed petition to the Ministry of Law and Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to support our campaign. Justice should not only be done, but also be seen to be done! I will update you on our next milestone. Thank you. Indira Jaising