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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 3:39 am
Time: 3:39 am
Results for protest movement
1 results foundAuthor: Human Rights Watch Title: Stifling Dissent: The Criminalization of Peaceful Expression in India Summary: Freedom of expression is protected under the Indian constitution and international treaties to which India is a party. Politicians, pundits, activists, and the general public engage in vigorous debate through newspapers, television, and the Internet, including social media . Successive governments have made commitments to protect freedom of expression. "Our democracy will not sustain if we can't guarantee freedom of speech and expression," Prime Minister Narendra Modi said in June 2014, after a month in office. Indeed, free speech is so ingrained that Amartya Sen's 2005 book, The Argumentative Indian, remains as relevant today as ever. Yet Indian governments at both the national and state level do not always share these values, passing laws and taking harsh actions to criminalize peaceful expression. The government uses draconian laws such as the sedition provisions of the penal code, the criminal defamation law, and laws dealing with hate speech to silence dissent. These laws are vaguely worded, overly broad, and prone to misuse, and have been repeatedly used for political purposes against critics at the national and state level. While some prosecutions, in the end, have been dismissed or abandoned, many people who have engaged in nothing more than peaceful speech have been arrested, held in pretrial detention, and subjected to expensive criminal trials. Fear of such actions, combined with uncertainty as to how the statutes will be applied, leads others to engage in self-censorship. Details: New York: HRW, 2016. 121p. Source: Internet Resource: Accessed June 8, 2016 at: https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/india0516.pdf Year: 2016 Country: India URL: https://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/report_pdf/india0516.pdf Shelf Number: 139330 Keywords: DemonstrationsFreedom of SpeechProtest Movement |