The Supreme Court of India introduced “Neutral Citations” for its judgments

Current Context: Neutral Citations are a uniform, reliable and secure methodology for identifying and citing decisions for all judgments of the Supreme Court of India. They are free of cost and do not depend on any publisher or database. They consist of three elements: a court identifier (SCI), a year identifier (2023) and a judgment number (1, 2, 3...). 

• The Neutral Citation System was announced by Chief Justice of India Dhananjaya Y. Chandrachud on 23rd February 2023. He said that it would ensure a uniform pattern of citing the decisions of the Supreme Court and enhance its accessibility.
• Neutral Citations are used in many other countries, such as Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
• They have different formats and conventions depending on the jurisdiction and court. For example, in Canada, a neutral citation consists of three parts: year of decision, abbreviation of the court and an ordinal number.
• In UK, a neutral citation is composed of a year, jurisdiction and court, a court division or list (if applicable) and a unique case number.

Some of the benefits of Neutral Citations are:

• They promote judicial independence by creating a public method of citing judicial decisions.
• They make it easier for courts to publish on the Web and for people to access them.
• They avoid confusion arising out of one case being cited by different people in different ways.
• They enable artificial intelligence (AI) to translate judgments and transcribe court proceedings with a uniform citation

Question:

Q.1 Who announced the introduction of neutral citations for the Supreme Court of India’s judgments?

a. Prime Minister Narendra Modi 

b. Attorney General K.K. Venugopal 

c. Chief Justice of India D.Y. Chandrachud

d. Law Minister Kiren Rijiju

The Supreme Court of India introduced “Neutral Citations” for its judgments