March 29, 2024

Syllabus– General Studies 2 (Polity)

Context

Recently the Supreme Court termed continued use of Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, 2000 by law enforcement agencies of various states as “a shocking state of affairs” and sought a response from the Centre.

  • It was repealed almost six years ago.
  • The Centre has now written to states, asking them not to register cases under the repealed provision and withdraw any such case that may have been filed.

In 2015, the apex court struck down the law in the landmark case Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, calling it “open-ended and unconstitutionally vague”, and thus expanded the contours of free speech to the Internet.

What is Section 66A do?

  • Introduced by the UPA government in 2008, the amendment to the IT Act, 2000, gave the government power to arrest and imprison an individual for allegedly “offensive and menacing” online posts, and was passed without discussion in Parliament.
  • Section 66A empowered police to make arrests over what policemen, in terms of their subjective discretion, could construe as “offensive” or “menacing” or for the purposes of causing annoyance, inconvenience, etc.
  • It prescribed the punishment for sending messages through a computer or any other communication device like a mobile phone or a tablet, and a conviction could fetch a maximum of three years in jail.

Criticism

The problem was with the vagueness about what is “offensive”.

  • The word having a very wide connotation was open to distinctive, varied interpretations. It was seen as subjective, and what might have been innocuous for one person, could lead to a complaint from someone else and, consequently, an arrest under Section 66A if the police prima facie accepted the latter person’s view.

Supreme Court scrutiny

  • The first petition came up in the court following the arrest of two girls in Maharashtra by Thane Police in November 2012 over a Facebook post. The girls had made comments on the shutdown of Mumbai for the funeral of Shiv Sena chief Bal Thackeray.
  • The arrests triggered outrage from all quarters over the manner in which the cyber law was used. The petition was filed by Shreya Singhal, then a 21-year-old law student.
  • Other petitioners-
    • Jadavpur University professor Ambikesh Mahapatra, arrested for forwarding caricatures on Mamata Banerjee
    • Activist Aseem Trivedi was arrested for drawing cartoons lampooning Parliament
    • Air India employee Mayank Sharma and K V Rao from Mumbai were arrested for allegedly posting offensive comments against politicians
    • Businessman Ravi Srinivasan was booked by Puducherry Police for an allegedly offensive tweet against the son of a former cabinet minister.

Ground for challenges

  • The petitioners argued that Section 66A came with extremely wide parameters, which allowed whimsical interpretations by law enforcement agencies.
  • Most of the terms used in the section had not been specifically defined under the Act, and the petitions argued that the law was a potential tool to gag legitimate free speech online, and to curtail freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under the Constitution, going far beyond the ambit of “reasonable restrictions” on that freedom.

Verdict

  • In a bench of Justices J. Chelameswar and R.F. Nariman ruled in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India declared Section 66A unconstitutional for “being violative of Article 19(1)(a) and not saved under Article 19(2).”
  • Article 19(1)(a) gives people the right to speech and expression whereas 19(2) accords the state the power to impose “reasonable restrictions” on the exercise of this right.

The decision was considered a landmark judicial pushback against state encroachment on the freedom of speech and expression.

Pending concerns

The bench also read down Section 79– now at the centre of the ongoing “intermediary liability” battle between the Centre and micro-blogging platform Twitter– defining key rules for the relationship between governments and commercial internet platforms.

  • Section 79 says that any intermediary shall not be held legally or otherwise liable for any third party information, data, or communication link made available or hosted on its platform.

Question- What was the significance of Shreya Singhal case with respect to right to freedom of speech and expression on the internet?

Article- https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-the-shreya-singhal-case-that-struck-down-section-66a-of-it-act-7408366/

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