ORDER :

1. Violence is the most extreme threat to freedom of expression. Many have paid with their lives for exercising this basic human right. Timothy Garton Ash in his seminal work "Free Speech" would call it as "the assassin's veto." When Ayatollah Khomeini issued fatwa to kill Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul remarked that assassination is an extreme form of literary criticism. Long back, an American free speech scholar Harry Kalven Junior coined the term "heckler's veto" to describe the way a speaker can be silenced in a public meeting. To these can be added "the prosecutor's veto." It is setting the criminal law in motion targeting those legitimately exercising their right of speech and expression.

2. A recent instance is the registration of FIR in Muzaffarpur District against 49 celebrities, including Ramchandra Guha, Aparna Sen, Mani Ratnam. They had written an open letter to the Prime Minister of India expressing concern over certain developments. A Muzaffarpur based lawyer Sudhir Kumar Ojha filed a case against them in the court of Chief Judicial Magistrate. Based on the direction given by the court, an FIR came to be registered for sedition, public nuisance, hurting religious