SC sets aside Delhi HC orders against Wikimedia; gives ANI liberty to move fresh plea in HC to remove ‘specific content’
The Hindu
Supreme Court sets aside Delhi High Court orders on Wikipedia page takedown in defamation case, granting fresh plea opportunity.
The Supreme Court on Thursday (April 17, 2025) set aside the orders passed by the Delhi High Court directing the takedown of a Wikipedia page on the basis of a defamation case filed by the news agency, Asia News International (ANI), against U.S.-based non-profit Wikimedia Foundation.
A Bench of Justices A.S. Oka and Ujjal Bhuyan observed that the High Court orders of April 2 and April 8, passed by a Single-Judge Bench and Division Bench, respectively, were based on prayers made by ANI that were too wide and incapable of being enforced.
Justice Oka, during the hearing, advised the counsel appearing for ANI to return to the High Court with a fresh application pointing out the specific content on the page that 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 top 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. Every time 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”.
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