-The Telegraph New Delhi: The Supreme Court today decided to refer to a five-judge Constitution bench the question whether the right to free speech and expression includes "the right to insult another person's right to dignity". A bench of Justices Dipak Misra, A.M. Khanwilkar and M. Shantanagoudar asked senior advocates Harish Salve and Fali Nariman, assisting the court as amicus curiae, and a counsel for former Uttar Pradesh minister Azam Khan to...

-Hindustan Times Delhi was shamed again when a four-year-old girl was raped and murdered on Thursday afternoon. But such incidents are not new in a city that is also notoriously known as the rape capital of India. Three months ago, a four-year-old girl was brutalized and murdered, allegedly by her father’s friend. The culprit was captured on CCTV camera luring the girl to a secluded place. In April last year, an eight-year-old girl...

-The Hindu The sense of impunity that drives discrimination against Dalits is at the heart of recent demands for the dilution, or even repeal, of the Act for prevention of atrocities against SCs and STs It is the sense of impunity nurtured by caste hierarchy that prepares the social ground for the “shockingly cruel and inhumane” crimes against Dalits called atrocities. It is this impunity that the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled...

-Hindustan Times The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) conceded on Friday that its crime statistics for 2014 and 2015 had misreported cases registered under Section 66A, a cyber law under the Information Technology Act that was scrapped by the Supreme Court last year. The NCRB’s ‘Crime in India’ report released last month had put the number of people arrested under Section 66A at 3,137 in 2015 and 2423 in 2014. This implied...

-The Hindu If the data on juvenile crime are anything to go by, the annual reports of the National Crime Records Bureau cannot be taken at face value. The National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) annual round-up of crime statistics has in recent years been the subject of extensive media coverage. The parsing of the official data, however, tends to be a superficial exercise, focussing on the big numbers instead of the minutiae. Numbers...