Political Offences and Speech Crimes
Anushka Singh · Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018
The first chapter is a comparative chapter on four legal regimes namely England, USA, Australia, and India dealing with political offences and speech crimes. The chapter analyses two particular paradigms to study the existence of sedition as an offence: first, the conventional paradigm of ‘violence as a physical act of force’ and second, the non-conventional paradigm of ‘violence through words’. Within the first paradigm, sedition is compared with the allied political offences of (a) treason, (b) incitement to disaffection/violence/overthrow, and (c) political conspiracies. Within the second paradigm, sedition is compared with four speech crimes, (a) personal libel, (b) hate speech, (c) blasphemy, and (d) pornography. Both levels of comparison offer deductions about specificity of sedition as a political speech act creating a discord within the value framework of liberal democracies.