Important points regarding contempt of court: GS 2: IAS
8:26 PM
- Through a most pernicious act of judicial fiat, in a judgment delivered on December 23, 2015, Justice A.B. Chaudhari, sitting on the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court, issued notice to the Booker Prize-winning writer Arundhati Roy for committing what he believed constituted a clear case of criminal contempt of court.
- The conventional defences adopted in favour of the judiciary retaining powers to punish acts of contempt invariably point to the Constitution.
- Article 19(1)(a) no doubt grants to the country's citizens a right to freedom of speech and expression. But the ensuing clause, Article 19(2), limits this freedom, and accords the state the express authority to make laws that establish reasonable restrictions on speech, on various grounds, including contempt of court
- in 1971, Parliament enacted the Contempt of Courts Act, with a purported view of defining and limiting the powers of courts in punishing acts of contempt, it was the inherent constraint in Article 19 that it took refuge under
- First, it defines civil contempt to include, among other things, a wilful disobedience of a court's judgment, order or direction.
- the 1971 law recognises two common forms of contempt
- second, it defines criminal contempt to include publications that do one or more of the following: (a) scandalise or lower the authority of any court; (b) prejudice or interfere with the due course of any judicial proceeding; or (c) interfere with or obstruct the administration of justice in any other manner.
- in 1970, the Supreme Court famously upheld a conviction of contempt of court against the former Chief Minister of Kerala, E.M.S. Namboodiripad.
- a 1996 decision in which the Supreme Court ruled that "all acts which bring the court into disrepute or disrespect or which offend its dignity or its majesty or challenge its authority" amount to punishable contempt.
- In 2006, with a view to reducing the breadth of the judiciary's powers, Parliament amended the Contempt of Courts Act of 1971.
- The law now provides two additional safeguards in favour of a dissenter.
- One, it establishes that a sentence for contempt of court can be imposed only when the court is satisfied that the contempt is of such a nature that it substantially interferes, or tends to substantially interfere with the due course of justice.
- Two, the truth in speech now constitutes a valid defence against proceedings of contempt, if the court is satisfied that the larger public interest is served through the publication of such content.
- In spite of these amendments, though, courts have continued to routinely equate the supposed scandalising of the judiciary's authority to an act of contempt.
- Interestingly, in England, whose laws of contempt we've so indiscriminately adopted, there hasn't been a single conviction for scandalising the court in more than eight decades.
- What's more, in 2013, after a recommendation by its Law Commission, the country altogether abolished as a form of contempt the offence of scandalising the judiciary
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