CourtHouse- An Online Video Conferencing App for Judicial Holdings

• The Background

The first Online Judicial proceeding was held on 27th March 2020 by The Supreme Court of India amidst the pandemic lockdown announced in India. The Supreme Court used the Vidyo Online Conferencing app, which is a Canadian online video conferencing software owned by Enghouse Systems. There have been cases where the Indian Government has demanded chat history from Giant companies like Facebook and Whatsapp Inc. but never got the support due to user privacy policies and the same is the case with Vidyo. We want to develop a transparent system where no third party is involved except the Application’s user base. The cases scheduled on our application would be an end to end encrypted and the recordings will be accessible only to the judge and the jail from where the person is on trial. Rest the main difference would be a simpler GUI so that it can be used in India on a large platform.

• The Need

This lockdown has got many cases on hold and we want to set up a paradigm of a simple tool that will be providing a platform to the prisoners and advocates helping them connect and continue with legal measures. We aim at launching a fully Indian alternative for the same, supporting the Aatm-Nirbhar Bharat Initiative of The Government of India.

• The Idea

Our project revolves around the progress in the judiciary system of the country. As we entered into a digital world, we lay down the idea of online court proceedings for criminal and non-criminal cases. Some High profile criminals are risky to be escorted to the court, this project can give us an edge in such situations. Moreover, if applied it will be the first Indian application to do it. We are applying as many innovative ideas as possible to improve the current scenario and considering the pandemic situation, court operations are on hold. This project is an attempt to get it going.

• Delivered Solution

The CourtHouse will be able to solve a lot of problems like helping the court to carry the court proceedings smoothly if in any case, the hearing can’t happen due to some reasons. it will save the manpower and time of the police that is wasted in escorting high profile prisoners to the court. We want the district courts, high courts to adopt this method of serving justice on video conferencing and the main aim is to provide them with an easy platform with a simple GUI. Recently, RSS ideologue KN Gonvindacharya had requested that the SC permit the live-streaming of procedures given the coronavirus flare-up. He had said that judges, advocates, and disputants are at incredible danger of communicable infections because of their expanded open association.

• User Interface

We did a lot of brainstorming on understanding the perspective of the user and came up with an optimum design for the Login and Register page where the user will register themselves using their email-id which would be verified by the email verification feature for ensuring the identity of the user. Next up, the user can log in to the home page. The same User-Centered Design ideation has been applied in webpage designing. We took an idea from various other websites and noted our perspective as a user so that we can try to implement similar features in our webpage. Contact us page, about page and the inquiry page has been added to the webpage for a better user experience. The Jails, Prisoners, Lawyers, Judiciary system would be the potential clients of the project. Jails and the Judiciary can use this system for smooth court proceedings without wasting any manpower or police support by escorting the High Profile-prisoners to court. Lawyers on the other hand can communicate with their clients if in any case, they are not able to visit. Encrypted video calls and chat features can be useful and assuring enough for the Attorney-Client privilege and will also be helpful if in some cases family is not able to visit the prisoner.

• Resources

For software resources, we are using Flutter application development for Android and iOS, which uses Dart language which is a new language launched in 2016 by Google. For the Web application of the project, we are using PHP/JavaScript. We are using Android Studio’s Firebase as a Database Management System for our project. There are no such Hardware resources used except Android and iOS smartphones where people will be able to use the application.

• Conclusion

We think as a project, if implemented successfully it can bring a revolution to the judiciary system as this idea has been brought up a lot but it has not been able to get its due importance. The quality of our project will be depending on the user-interface quality we offer and stability in video connections. The features, CourtHouse will be offering to the Lawyers, Jails and the judge will be very easy and efficient.