While the Supreme Court is seized of a batch of petitions questioning the constitutionality of criminal defamation proceedings, the Madras high court on Tuesday stopped just inches short of decriminalizing the ‘offence’ when it ruled that persons facing such cases could not be considered to have a ‘criminal background’.
“The trend all over the world appears to be towards decriminalisation of defamation. The Supreme Court is also seized of the issue. In such circumstances, it is not possible for us to convince ourselves that filing of a private complaint of defamation against a person for writing articles in a magazine could make him a person with criminal background,” ruled a division bench of Justice V Ramasubramanian and K Ravichandrabaabu.
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