There is hot debate going on in the media regarding rights of the media in subjudice matters and to what extent media should report court proceeding. Can Supreme Court frame guidelines to limit media or can it order to media to differ reporting? Would it not be intrusion in citizen’s right to know what actually transpired in the court during the course of hearing in a matter of public curiosity? I am highly convinced and influenced with the thoughts of Mr A.G. Noorani who wrote this article in Hindustan Times long back and it was preserved in my archives. I feel the entire media community must fight for the protection of this most precious right and must oppose and any sort of curbs on it in the shape of guidelines and and the same time it must evolve self mechanism to ensure fair reporting so that the rights of fair trial of an accused person are not jeopardise. In short media must refrain from making judgement and must confine to its role of reporting facts. <\/p>\n
Reporting justice<\/strong><\/p>\n A.G. Noorani<\/p>\n Journalists are \u201cwretched\u201d, \u201cprofessors are worse\u201d and \u201ccivil liberties organisations serve no purpose\u201d. There is, surely, a clear public interest in mentioning the identity of the judge who made such remarks from the Bench. They were made by Justice Yogeshwar Dayal, then of the Delhi High Court, on February 6, 1985, apropos the PUCL-PUDR report on the Delhi riots of 1984. He was elevated to the Supreme Court. If the practice, prescribed recently by a former Chief Justice of India, was in force, the press could not have mentioned the judge\u2019s name. News agencies and court reporters are required, instead, to attribute comments made during the hearing to \u2018the Bench\u2019.<\/p>\n One finds this farce \u2014 \u201cthe Bench said\u201d \u2014 perpetrated regularly. This is a falsification of the record. For, \u201cthe Bench\u201d speaks only through its judgments, be they unanimous, concurrent or dissenting. But during the hearing of a case, judges speak individually, not in unison, and the public has an incontestable right to know who said what. It was exercised freely in the first 45 years of the Supreme Court\u2019s existence, not least during the hotly contested case of political significance. No other court in the entire democratic world imposes such curbs. On December 20, 1984, Chief Justice Y.V. Chandrachud, presiding over a Constitution Bench, denounced the petitioner\u2019s \u201ckind of journalism\u201d as \u201canti-Indian\u201d. He took no offence when the remarks were reported and he was criticised.<\/p>\n The judiciary and the press are not adversaries. Both exercise vigil on exercise of power. The press have received protection from the courts. It has rushed to the defence of judges when politicians vilify them. Both are, however, bound by the Constitution \u2014 the fundamental right to free speech within it guarantees and are subject to the duty of transparency towards the citizen. Suppression of the names of judges who make observations during the hearings is a practice as unique as it is pernicious. It must end. It has no legal force in any case. Once in a while, one comes across a strange court ruling on press reportage. On August 2, for instance, while hearing a plea for the extension of custody of Arvind Johari, director of Cyberspace Infosys Ltd., in the UTI scam case, Special CBI Judge S.R. Mehra directed that reporters could \u201cwatch the proceedings and report only from the certified court order\u201d. They were asked not to take notes of the proceedings like \u201ccollege students in a coaching class\u201d.<\/p>\n One hopes the Supreme Court will overrule its judgment on this aspect which it gave in a different climate 35 years ago. It was sharply criticised by two of the country\u2019s ablest constitutional lawyers, M.C. Setalvad and H.M. Seervai. The facts were simple. Hearing a libel case by a noted industrialist, Krishnaraj M.D. Thackersey, against Blitz, Justice V.M. Tarkunde orally directed the press not to report deposition by a witness who claimed that reports of earlier deposition had caused him loss in business. The tabloid\u2019s correspondent, N.S.Mirajkar, and three other journalists moved the Supreme Court for enforcement of their fundamental rights to freedom of speech and expression and to practise their profession (Articles 19[1][a] and [g] respectively). With a solitary dissent, the court\u2019s nine-member Bench held that an order of a judge cannot violate a citizen\u2019s fundamental rights, a ruling which the court all but overruled in 1988 in A.R. Antulay\u2019s case. On the issue of the court\u2019s power to forbid publication of its public proceedings, the majority construed the order as one which prohibited publication during the trial of the case and not permanently.<\/p>\n But Justice Hidayatullah rightly pointed out in his dissent that as the intention was to save the witness\u2019s business from harm, it was reasonable to believe that it was meant to be a permanent ban and this is how the press regarded it. The majority considered the law as to when proceedings can be held in camera and ruled that since a court can bar the public from the courtroom in certain cases, that power \u201cmust include the power\u2026 to prohibit excessive publication of a part of the proceedings at such trial\u201d, even if held in public. This was an unfounded claim based on an unwarranted inference. Chief Justice P.B. Gajendragadkar said that the order was necessary \u201cin order to obtain the evidence in the case with a view to do justice between the parties\u201d, and \u201cif incidentally as a result of this order, the petitioners were not able to report what they heard in court, that cannot be said to make the impugned order invalid under Article 19(1)(a)\u201d (freedom of speech). He overlooked the fact that the violation of the rights of the press was not \u201cincidental\u201d but direct and substantial.<\/p>\n Underlying his reasoning was the assumption that the pressperson has no right, as such, to be in court to observe and report to the public. Justice Sarkar said as much in his concurring judgment: \u201cHe has no right to hear the proceedings. Indeed, there is no fundamental right to hear. If he has not, then it should follow that his liberty of speech has not been affected\u201d by the order directing a trial in camera. This reflected an archaic outlook. It is now accepted that the press has every right to witness a judicial proceeding. The press reporter in asserting this right does so, both as a citizen himself and as a surrogate of the public to whom he owes a professional duty. Justice Hidayatullah correctly stated the rule about reporting of cases in court. \u201cWhat takes place in court is public and the publication of the proceedings merely enlarges the area of the In Seervai\u2019s view, Justice Tarkunde\u2019s order \u201ccontained a perpetual injunction against publication of the evidence and the order was beyond the jurisdiction of Tarkunde… it was an order that could be dissolved with impunity\u201d, a view which the privy council had taken in such a case. A ruling of the US Supreme Court in the Richmond Newspapers Case in 1980 not only supports Hidayatullah\u2019s dissent but opens new vistas for press freedom. Three trials in a murder case having come to a naught, in the fourth the court closed the trial to the public on a plea by the defence, which neither the prosecutor nor the press opposed. Later in the day, Richmond Newspapers applied for its reversal, unsuccessfully. Over the solitary dissent of Justice Rehnquist, the Supreme Court held the order to be violative of the First Amendment (the right to free speech). Chief Justice Warren Burger said: \u201cInstead of acquiring information about trials by first-hand observation or by word of mouth from those who attended, people now acquire it chiefly through the print and electronic media. In a sense, this validates the media claim of functioning as surrogates for the \u201cWhile media representatives enjoy the same right of access as the public, they often are provided special seating and priority of entry so that they may report what people in attendance have seen and heard… the Constitution affords protection against exclusion of the public from criminal trials\u201d and \u201cfree speech carries with it some freedom to listen.\u201d This case shows that both \u2014 the Mirajkar ruling and the practice of attributing a judge\u2019s observations to \u201cthe Bench\u201d \u2014 to be wholly wrong. Both deserve speedy reversal.<\/p>\n Writer Mudit Mathur is senior journalist.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There is hot debate going on in the media regarding rights of the media in subjudice matters and to what extent media should report court proceeding. Can Supreme Court frame guidelines to limit media or can it order to media to differ reporting? Would it not be intrusion in citizen’s right to know what actually transpired in the court during the course of hearing in a matter of public curiosity? I am highly convinced and influenced with the thoughts of Mr A.G. Noorani who wrote this article in Hindustan Times long back and it was preserved in my archives. I feel the entire media community must fight for the protection of this most precious right and must oppose and any sort of curbs on it in the shape of guidelines and and the same time it must evolve self mechanism to ensure fair reporting so that the rights of fair trial of an accused person are not jeopardise. In short media must refrain from making judgement and must confine to its role of reporting facts. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yeduniya"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bhadas4media.com\/samachar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bhadas4media.com\/samachar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bhadas4media.com\/samachar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bhadas4media.com\/samachar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bhadas4media.com\/samachar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1193"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bhadas4media.com\/samachar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1193\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bhadas4media.com\/samachar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bhadas4media.com\/samachar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bhadas4media.com\/samachar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
court and gives to the trial that added publicity which is favoured by the rule that the trial should be open and public.\u201d<\/p>\n
public.<\/p>\n