India: After Swamy plea, court to review penal provisions for hate speech

The Times of India

Jul 03 2015 : The Times of India (Delhi)
After Swamy plea, court to review penal provisions for hate speech
Amit Anand Choudhary
New Delhi:

After agreeing to examine constitutional validity of the criminal defamation law, the SC on Thursday also decided to review the penal provisions for hate speech and sought response from the Centre for scrapping the law for allegedly violating citizens' right to freedom of speech.

According to the law, hate speech is any speech, gesture or conduct, writing or display which is forbidden because it may incite violence or hurt religious feelings or promote enmity between different groups on grounds of religion, race, place of birth, resi dence, language etc.

A bench of justices Ranjan Gogoi and M Y Eqbal said that constitutional validity of sections 153, 153A,153B, 295, 295A, 298 and 505 of the IPC in respect of so-called “hate speech“ needed to be examined and issued notice to the Centre on BJP member Subramanian Swamy's plea for scrapping or reading down of the penal provisions. Swamy is facing various criminal proceedings in Delhi, Mumbai, Assam, Mohali and Kerala for expressing views on terrorism which were termed as hate speech under IPC provisions. He pleaded the court to stay proceedings against him till it decided on the validity of the law.

The bench declined his plea saying: “We are inclined to hear the case on larger issue of constitutional validity of provisions and we will not go into individual cases.“ It, how ever, stayed the execution of a non-bailable warrant (NBW) issued against him by a Ka rimganj court for six weeks and asked him to approach the appropriate HCs for staying s the proceedings against him., Swamy alleged that the provisions dealing with ofs fences of `hate speech' were vi olative of the fundamental r right to freedom of speech and were being were used to penals ize people for expressing their views even within the bounds of reasonable restrictions and s they should be set aside.

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