ANI asks HC to initate contempt case against Wikipedia, says 36 hr deadline over

NEW DELHI: Asian News International (ANI) on Friday moved the Delhi high court to seek contempt proceedings against Wikipedia, saying it missed the court’s 36-hour deadline to remove a page on the 2-crore defamation suit filed against it by the news platform.
Lawyer Siddhant Kumar, who appeared for the news platform, asked a bench of chief justice Manmohan and justice Tushar Rao Gedela to list the contempt plea before itself on Monday as the free online and crowd-sourced information encyclopedia had failed to comply with the court’s October 16 order.
The bench initially asked Kumar to first approach a single judge who could refer the case to a division bench but later agreed to straightaway take up ANI’s request on Monday when it takes up Wikipedia’s plea against a single judge’s August 20 order
The page, which was ordered to be removed on October 16, was created after ANI sued Wikipedia over an allegedly defamatory description of the news agency.
The high court on August 20 directed Wikipedia to disclose information about the people who edited the page within two weeks. ANI later filed a contempt plea alleging that Wikipedia failed to abide by the August 20 order.
On September 5, a bench of justice Navin Chawla threatened to pass an order directing the government to close Wikipedia’s business transactions in India. Pursuant to the hearing, another page appeared titled “Asian News International vs. Wikimedia Foundation”.
This page claimed that the presiding judge –– Navin Chawla –– threatened to shut down Wikipedia in India if necessary. It further claimed that Justice Chawla’s order directing the crowd-sourced information platform to disclose the information about people who edited ANI’s Wikipedia page in the defamation suit, amounted to “censorship” and was a “threat to flow of information”. Later, Wikipedia moved the division bench of Delhi high court against an order passed on August 20.
On Monday, the high court, while expressing strong disapproval over the page, asked the platform if it was willing to take the same down. The bench said that Wikipedia –– it calls itself a “free, online encyclopedia” –– cannot threaten the judge. “This page will have to be taken down by your client in case he even wants to be heard. You may be a powerful entity, but we live in a country governed by law, and we take pride in that,” it said.
Defending the platform, senior advocate Amit Sibal submitted that his client did not create the pages on which the August 20 order was being commented upon and the page on which discussion had been opened pursuant to Monday’s hearing. He further stated that his client would take down the page and discussion, if the court directed so.