 "Bombay High Court. Photo: A Savin. Wikimedia")
Considering the rise in COVID-19
cases in Maharashtra, the Aurangabad bench of the Bombay High Court will halt all physical hearings till April 4, and hear matters only through video-conferencing, an official said on Friday.
As per a notice issued by the HC registrar, the Aurangabad bench will only hear urgent matters during this period, and all these matters will be heard video-conferencing between March 22 and April 4.
The Aurangabad bench of the Bombay HC Bar Association had written to the court earlier in the day urging it to revert to virtual court proceedings till COVID-19 cases in the region came down.
Earlier this month, the Nagpur bench had also suspended physical hearings and began conducting virtual hearings for urgent matters.
In December last year, all benches of the Bombay High Court and all subordinate courts in Maharashtra except Pune, had resumed physical hearings.
Since the coronavirus pandemic began, the courts had been conducting hearings online, through video interface.
The principal bench of the High Court in the city currently conducts physical hearings on all working days in a week.
A few designated benches conduct virtual hearings on Fridays only for cases in which lawyers or parties are based outside Mumbai, or are unable to attend physical hearings due to specific reasons.
(Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
