Gurugram: The Punjab and Haryana High Court has ruled that newspapers cannot be hauled up for criminal contempt for reporting a court order that was announced in open court, even if the judge had not yet put his signature on it.
The ruling has provided relief to Jyoti Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief of The Tribune, and editors and reporters of Hindustan Times and The Times of India, who were facing criminal contempt proceedings over reports they had published about the High Court transferring the Kotkapura police firing cases from Faridkot to Chandigarh.
A division bench of Justices Jasgurpreet Singh Puri and Amarjot Bhatti dismissed the contempt petition, holding that what the three newspapers had reported was accurate, and that accurate reporting of court proceedings is protected under law. Their order was delivered last month but made public Thursday.
The matter pertains to two petitions that had come up before a single-judge bench of the High Court, filed by Charanjit Sharma and Paramraj Singh Umranangal, both seeking transfer of trial in two Kotkapura FIR cases from the Sessions Court, Faridkot, to a court in Chandigarh. The single-judge bench heard both petitions together on 9 April this year and dictated a common order in open court directing the transfer.
The order had not been signed yet when The Tribune, Hindustan Times, and The Times of India carried a report the next morning on 10 April, stating that the High Court had shifted the Kotkapura cases to Chandigarh.
The single-judge bench took strong exception to this, noting that since the order was not signed, the reports appeared to have been published without basis and prima facie seemed to be an attempt to overreach the court and interfere with the administration of justice. He initiated suo motu contempt proceedings and referred the matter to the division bench.
The division bench went through the newspaper reports and the judgment and found that the newspapers had got their facts right. The trial had indeed been transferred from Faridkot to Chandigarh. The court pointed to Section 4 of the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971, which states that publishing a fair and accurate report of judicial proceedings at any stage is not contempt. Since the reporting was accurate, the newspapers were protected.
The bench also settled the legal question of whether an unsigned judgment has any standing. It does, the court said.
Relying on a Supreme Court judgment from as far back as 1954 (Surendra Singh vs State of UP)—the bench held that a judgement becomes operative the moment it is pronounced in open court. Signing comes later and is only a procedural formality to put the decision on record. It does not decide when the judgment takes effect.
The Supreme Court had held in that case that even if a judgment is acted upon without being signed, the proceedings based on it remain valid as long as the judgment was properly delivered in court. This position was reaffirmed in later orders as well.
So, when the three newspapers reported the order on 10 April, an operative judgment was already in existence. The reporters had not reported something that had not happened but had simply covered what a court had already decided and announced. The division bench thus dismissed the criminal contempt petition. All connected applications were also disposed of.
(Edited by Nida Fatima Siddiqui)
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