Sri Lankan judge’s Karnataka HC petition over ‘defamatory’ articles is ‘adventurous’ and not maintainable: Google

At the start of the hearing, he said Google had the highest respect for the judge and his post.

Kulkarni said that Google India could not be made a party respondent and that the judge would have to amend his petition and make Google LLC the respondent. He said Google LLC, the US-based company, operates and manages the search engine Google. He submitted that the petition, filed over a year ago, has “suddenly come up for hearing now”.

Advocate Prabhakaran Ramachandran, appearing for Justice Nawaz, pleaded with the court to take a clear stand that judges all over the world cannot be intimidated with malicious articles. He claimed that Google had taken a very pedantic, whimsical stand across the globe of not taking down alleged defamatory articles about judges.

Ramachandran further said, “The integrity of the judiciary must be protected. The moment such content is brought to the notice of Google, they are required to remove it.”

Ramachandran alleged that Google has become a law unto itself. He argued that if some scandalous remarks were made against Google and its CEO, Sundar Pichai, the company would not allow the content to stay online.
“They can’t say that they are not responsible and only are posting it,” he said.

Ramachandran said the two journalists who published the allegedly defamatory reports had moved from Sri Lanka to London. He also referred to the remarks the journalists allegedly made on Facebook after reports of the judge’s petition were published recently.

Justice Sachin Shankar Magadum briefly directed the judge to amend the petition and directed the Centre and Google to file a short reply and posted the matter for further hearing on March 26.

‘No less than a murder of reputation’

In his petition, Justice Nawaz said the allegedly defamatory articles—published in 2015 and 2020—had traversed far beyond the shores of Sri Lanka and inflicted grievous damage upon his reputation as a jurist. He said the claims made in the articles are baseless and threaten to erode his global standing, “which he has cultivated over many years of dedication and scholarship”.

Further, the petition states that the articles in question are “no less than a murder of reputation, an assassination of his character, and is a calculated attempt to deprive him of the dignity he has rightfully earned as a sitting judge of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka and as a well-renowned academician”.

The petition also contends that the articles seek to obliterate his reputation, imputing a crime he had not, nor would ever, commit. “Such baseless allegations are an unabashed affront to personal integrity and professional standing, perpetrated without a shred of evidence or truth,” it stated.

Why did he approach the Karnataka HC?

The petition stated that as Justice Nawaz is a Supreme Court judge in Sri Lanka, he is ethically prohibited from filing a lawsuit there, as it would conflict with the well-established legal principle that one cannot be a judge in one’s own cause.

As the alleged defamation against him was perpetrated through online platforms, particularly via Google, and since the company’s Indian headquarters is in Bengaluru, he filed the petition before the Karnataka High Court.