Relevance:
Attorney General of India K K Venugopal has declined a request for consent to initiate criminal contempt of court proceedings against Senior Advocate and MP Kapil Sibal for certain remarks that he made during a speech on the subject of “Judicial Rollback of Civil Liberties”.
About:
- Contempt is “the disobedience of an order of a court” and, “also conduct tending to obstruct or interfere with the orderly administration of justice”.
- The Contempt of Courts Act, 1971– Civil contempt or Criminal contempt.
- Civil contempt – “wilful disobedience to any judgment, decree, direction, order, writ or other process of a court, or wilful breach of an undertaking given to a court”.
- Criminal contempt – “the publication (whether by words, spoken or written, or by signs, or by visible representations, or otherwise) of any matter or the doing of any other act whatsoever which:
- scandalises or tends to scandalise, or lowers or tends to lower the authority of, any court; or
- prejudices, or interferes or tends to interfere with, the due course of any judicial proceeding; or
- interferes or tends to interfere with, or obstructs or tends to ob
- struct, the administration of justice in any other manner.”
Reference: The Indian Express
