A bench of Supreme Court judges ordered one of India’s senior-most lawyers to study condom packets to determine if the pictures used on the boxes breach India’s obscenity laws or not, Yahoo News reported.
Often condom boxes depict photos of scantily clad women or couples in overtly sexual positions.
Additional Solicitor General, Maninder Singh have been directed to spend six weeks to inspect the pictures used in condom boxes.
“Do you have any plan to regulate such advertisements?” a Supreme Court bench was quoted by the Indian Express asking Singh, the government’s third-ranked legal officer. “You also have to tell us if such advertisements may constitute a penal offence,” the newspaper reported the bench as saying.Excerpt from Yahoo News
Recently, condom manufacturers appealed against a High Court order which called for a ban of seductive photos from condom packets on the grounds that they were obscene and against the Indian culture.
Punishment for violations of the Oscenity Law (Section 294) of the IPC can attract upto two years in jail as punishment and five years for repeat offenders.
Read the full story on Yahoo News.
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