Harsh Jadon, Lloyd Law College
Abstract
The regulation of hate speech has proven to be a challenging endeavour and in recent times, we have witnessed a spike in cases of hate speech. The anti-hate speech law is contested because of its confrontation with the freedom of speech and expression of an individual. In practice, the law is always treading the treacherously thin line between regulation and complete restriction which makes necessary to have an identifying criteria of hate speech. But despite adopting strict laws, hate speech cases are still on the rise. To curb this, more stringent laws were proposed by the Law Commission of India in 2017. This has led to a situation of abundance of laws and a state of over criminalisation of speech related offences. And such laws impact individual's right to express. Therefore, assessing the effectiveness of laws on ground level is also important to make laws more suitable. In light of the clear harm that hate speech causes, it is time to go beyond the current framework and look for best practices that can be embraced to address the problem of hate speech in inclusion to the legal framework.
Keywords: Freedom of speech, Hate speech, Law Commission of India, Legal Framework, Criminalisation
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