-The Indian Express The Union government has decided to decriminalise suicide. A funny interpretation could well be that the Modi government can now commit hara kiri with impunity. But it should be noted that the cases under Section 309, which criminalises suicide, are haphazard, often concealing abetment to murder. Philosophically, it is argued that the right to life includes the right to die without provocation or abetment by anyone else. In a...
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Sec 66A of IT act lacks guidelines, arrests made over social media posts prone to abuse: SC -Utkarsh Anand
-The Indian Express The Supreme Court on Tuesday observed that Section 66A of the Information Technology Act, which empowers police to make arrests over social media posts, apparently lacked guidelines on when such power can be exercised and that somebody's "annoyance" was enough in certain cases for invoking the law. "Section 66A does not give any specific guidance on when to invoke it, unlike the provisions in the Indian Penal Code (IPC)....
More »Anup Surendranath, assistant professor at National Law University and Project head of Death Penalty Research Project, speaks to Uttam Sengupta
-Outlook It has taken 16 months, 400 interviews and over Rs 30 lakh for the ‘Death Penalty Research Project' to see the light of day. It has taken 16 months, 400 interviews and over Rs 30 lakh for the ‘Death Penalty Research Project' to see the light of day. Project head Anup Surendranath, an assistant professor at National Law University, Delhi, speaks to Uttam Sengupta. Excerpts: * What triggered this project in...
More »Disaster in progress -Indira Jaising
-The Indian Express On the 30th anniversary of the Bhopal disaster, memories of the victims' suffering surface once again. One is at a loss for words to describe what happened on the intervening night of December 2-3, 1984. Was it an accident? Or was it industrial genocide? We will never know what it was, since no investigation was conducted on what caused water to leak into 41 tonnes of higly toxic...
More »Green law to subsume existing authorities mooted -Nitin Sethi & Somesh Jha
-Business Standard A committee set up to review laws related to protection of environment and forests, headed by former Cabinet secretary T S R Subramanian, has recommended an omnibus green law that will not only subsume existing legislation, but also hold the potential to undo existing judicial pronouncements on environmental issues. The proposed law will also do away with all existing authorities created under the Environment Protection Act, 1986. The panel's report,...
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