Why Indias Web Censorship Regime is Rotten & Needs Urgent Reform – The Quint

Much has been made by the government that web companies should comply with any order they recieve. In fact, under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, ensuring the protection of human rights requires firms to ensure that their operations do not result in knowing and preventable infringement of rights.

The UN's Special Rapporteurs on Freedom of Expression have also emphasised that web platforms should review the government orders they receive and ensure that measures are lawful, including being necessary and proportionate, before censoring online speech.

And as any news sector business in India would tell you, there are directives received from a range of government agencies that require narrowing and push-back all the time some of which end up as court cases. So why should the situation be so different for online content?

At the minimum, if any of this goes into litigation as a bye-product of the Union governments dispute with Twitter, then there is good ground that the courts should reconsider the initial hope they placed in the governments restraint, in their earlier Shreya Singhal ruling.

But perhaps at a larger level, we need to ask our elected lawmakers and public officials why web censorship orders should be regarded as acceptable in the Indian republic.

If we do believe that these troubling powers might be needed in truly exceptional circumstances, then we need to ensure they are wielded not by bureaucrats beholden to the government, but by judges and in a manner that is transparent and accountable to Parliament. And indeed, their use should be absolutely exceptional not a regular occasion several times in the year.

(Raman Jit Singh Chima is Policy Director at Access Now, an international digital rights advocacy and policy group, and a co-founder of the Internet Freedom Foundation. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the authors own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)

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Why Indias Web Censorship Regime is Rotten & Needs Urgent Reform - The Quint