Merely watching child porn not crime under POCSO, IT acts? SC verdict tomorrow

The Supreme Court will deliver on Monday its judgment on a plea challenging a ruling through which the Madras high court held that ‘only watching child porn’ is not an offence under the POCSO (Protection of Children from Sexual Offences) and the Information Technology (IT) acts, PTI reported.
A bench led by Chief Justice of India (CJI), DY Chandrachud, had reserved its judgment in April. Justices JB Pardiwala and Manoj Misra are also on the bench.
On January 11, the high court quashed the criminal case against 28-year-old S Harish, observing that under section 67B of the IT Act, an accused should have ‘published, transmitted, or created material depicting children in a sexually-explicit act.’
“A careful reading of this provision does not make watching child pornography, per se, an offence under section 67B,” the single-judge bench of Justice N Anand Venkatesh noted.
“Though widely worded, the relevant section does not cover a case where a person has merely downloaded child pornography in an electronic gadget and watched it, without doing anything more,” the bench stated.
Further, it observed that though there were two videos of minor boys on the phone of the accused, who had approached the high court seeking the quashing of the case, he did not publish or share the clips with others, and therefore, these were within his private domain.
However, Justice Venkatesh expressed concern over kids watching pornographic videos and advised the petitioner to seek counselling if he was still afflicted with the addiction of porn.
Terming the observations as ‘atrocious,’ the top court agreed to hear the plea against the high court’s ruling.
Senior counsel HS Phoolka, who appeared for two NGOs, argued that the original order gives an ‘impression’ that downloading and possessing child pornography is not an offence.’