The Kerala High Court has published two of its recent judgments in Malayalam on the website of the High court and with this, the Kerala high court became the first in the country to publish judgments in the regional language.
The judgments in Malayalam were uploaded on the court’s website just below the English version. Two judgments passed by the division bench comprising Chief Justice S Manikumar and Justice Shaji P Chaly, in WA 1638/2022, and WA 926/2016, were uploaded on the website.
The development comes a day after the Supreme Cout launched a trial of a live transcription service to transcribe its proceedings using Artificial Intelligence (AI) and technology powered by Natural Language Processing.
It is to be noted that the Supreme Court formed an Artificial Intelligence committee to develop a dedicated open-source judicial domain language translation tool called SUVAS (Supreme Court Vidhik Anuwad Software ) to translate judgments from English to vernacular languages. The Kerala High Court made use of this tool to translate the judgments.
On observing that the English language in its “legal avatar” was not comprehensible to 99.9% of Indian citizens, Chief Justice of India D.Y Chandrachud, in January this year, had said that the judgments of the Supreme Court would be translated to four languages–Hindi, Gujarati, Odia, and Tamil.
The Supreme Court proposed to release 1,268 of its judgments in 13 Indian languages on the Republic Day this year. The proposal was first mooted by former President Ram Nath Kovind in 2017. He had then said that it was important not only to take justice to the people, but also to make it understandable to litigating parties in a language they know. By July 2019, the Supreme Court began uploading judgements in regional languages.
The High Court of Kerala through its initiative has thus moved towards increased accessibility with respect to the dissemination of judicial information.
Story Update By: Ms. Sai Sushmitha, Correspondent at Lawgic
Edited By: Ms. Nandini Nair, Content-Head at Lawgic
