A view of Supreme Court
| Photo Credit:
Manvender Vashist Lav
The Supreme Court on Thursday set aside orders passed by the Delhi High Court directing the takedown of a Wikipedia page on the basis of a defamation case filed by news agency, Asia News International (ANI), against US-based non-profit Wikimedia Foundation INC.
An Apex court Bench of Justices AS Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan observed that the High Court orders of April 2 and April 8, passed by a Single-Judge and Division Bench, respectively, were based on prayers made by ANI which were too wide and incapable of being enforced.
‘False, misleading and defamatory’
Justice Oka, during the hearing, advised the counsel appearing for ANI to return to the High Court with a fresh application pointing out specific content on the page which it felt was “false, misleading and defamatory”.
“Go back to the single judge (of the High Court) to make specific prayers pointing out specific portions to be removed from their website… When you say ‘remove all false content’, what is to be removed… who decides what is defamatory,” Justice Oka asked the counsel.
The counsel for the news agency said his client had no objection to the apex court setting aside the High Court orders while granting liberty to make a fresh plea for grant of interim injunction limited to specific contents or republication of the same content.
“This (page) is dynamic in nature. Everytime I (ANI) assail certain statements on the page, new statements or republication of the same statements with slightly different verbiage may come… They change a word or two and the same content comes back,” he submitted.
Accordingly, the Bench quashed the High Court orders and allowed the news agency to make a fresh application before a single judge for “grant of appropriate interim injunction in respect of specific content therein the site of the petitioner (Wikimedia) or republication of the specific content”.
The Bench asked the Single Judge, in case such an application is made, to decide it on its own merits uninfluenced by the apex court order of April 17. The top court left open all contentions raised by the parties to be decided by the single judge.
The news agency had filed a defamation suit against Wikimedia Foundation in the Delhi High Court in July 2024.
Published on April 17, 2025