While it was hearing a PIL challenging Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s election as an MP from the Rae Bareli constituency, the Allahabad High Court told a LiveLaw journalist to leave the courtroom and “report from outside”.
The legal news portal put up an update on X about the incident. “Bench asks LiveLaw’s reporter to stop reporting court proceedings and leave the courtroom. Justice Mathur: Aap (referring to the reporter of Live Law) bahar jaaiye aur wahan reporting kijiye apni.”
Bench asks LiveLaw's reporter to stop reporting court proceedings and leave the courtroom
— Live Law (@LiveLawIndia) June 26, 2024
Justice Mathur : Aap (referring to the reporter of Live Law) bahar jaaiye aur wahan reporting kijiye apni.#AllahabadHighCourt #RahulGandhi https://t.co/4q5spb8BlN
The journalist in question was Sparsh Upadhyay, an associate editor with LiveLaw. He told Newslaundry that the judge purportedly assumed that he was a journalist as he was “continuously typing on the phone” and live-tweeting the hearing.
“The Supreme Court has held that if a journalist wants to cover courtroom conversations, it can be reported. It is part of our right to report and exercise freedom of expression,” Upadhyay said. “Matters of public interest should especially be reported by journalists so that the public can know. In this case, the matter was a public interest litigation, so the public, all the more, has a right to know. Moves such as these will discourage people from reporting from the court.”
Upadhyay said that he was the only journalist in the courtroom. The matter was heard for half an hour before the lunch break, and the hearing had started again after lunch. But five minutes into it, he was asked to leave.
“The matter continued after that for 15-20 minutes, but we don’t know what happened. We had to end the thread and story abruptly due to this,” he said. “Something similar happened last year too, during a hearing on the film Adipurush, when a judge objected to my reporting and said we must take one or two observations from the court and tweet them out.”
At the time of the incident today, the court was hearing a petition which claimed that Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was ineligible to contest the Lok Sabha election as he was not an Indian citizen but a British citizen. The vacation bench of Justices Alok Mathur and Arun Kumar Singh Deshwal adjourned the hearing without going into the merits of the matter. It will now be heard by a regular bench on July 1.
LiveLaw detailed the incident in a report on the hearing. “During the course of the hearing, a vacation bench of Justice Alok Mathur and Justice Arun Kumar Singh Deshwal asked LiveLaw’s reporter (Associate Editor Sparsh Upadhyay) to stop reporting court proceedings and leave the courtroom.”
“This report is based only on the court’s observations made until the reporter was asked to leave the courtroom.”
The journalist said he was asked to leave while the petitioner’s counsel was arguing that he has a right to file petitions without filing a demand draft. The court also objected to the petitioner standing close to the counsel saying that the area was meant for advocates.
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