Karnataka High Court to restart proceedings through videoconference with new safeguards from December 11

Karnataka HC to restart videoconference proceedings from Dec 11 with new guidelines to prevent unauthorised access. All participants must register in ODCD portal & use same email ID for Zoom sign-up. Those outside India must seek permission from Registrar (Judicial) in advance.

The High Court of Karnataka will restart on a pilot basis its proceedings through videoconference (VC) mode from December 11 with a new set of guidelines using the online user-verified login system to prevent entry of unauthorised persons to the VC.

The VC facility was stopped on December 5 after unidentified miscreants illegally logged into around six court halls through VC and played porn video clips during the live court proceedings on December 4 afternoon and December 5 morning.

The court’s Computers Wing had lodged a first information report (FIR) with the Cyber, Economics and Narcotics (CEN) police station in this regard by providing internet protocol IDs of the systems used by the miscreants to gain entry to the VC through the Zoom platform. The miscreants had illegally used login IDs and passwords of different court halls provided on the High Court’s website only for the use of authorised participants, the advocates and the litigant/party-in-persons litigants, to join the court proceedings.

The new guidelines, issued on Saturday by the Courts’ Registrar (Computers), state that all the advocates, party-in-persons/litigants, and media persons should get themselves compulsorily registered on the Zoom platform as a one-time measure by sign-up procedure.

Before registering in the Zoom platform by sign-up procedure, each advocate, party-in-person, litigant, and government departments should mandatorily register in the High Court’s Online Digital Case Diary (ODCD) portal by visiting the URL: https://karnatakajudiciary.kar.nic.in/advreg.

The email IDs furnished while registering in the ODCD portal should be the email IDs to be used for sign-up/login in the Zoom VC platform, the new guidelines state.

Meanwhile, the Computers Wing on Saturday successfully verified the email IDs of nearly 10,000 advocates who have been already registered on the ODCD portal, along with their registration data of the Karnataka State Bar Council, said N.G. Dinesh, Registrar (Computers).