Section 332: Court orders after a defamation conviction

Firm annotation

Section 332 creates no offence. It gives the court two ancillary powers, available only in a case of defamation in which the accused has been found guilty. The court may order the seizure and destruction of the object, or of the part of the object, containing the defamatory matter, and it may order the publication of the whole or part of the judgment in one or more newspapers, once or several times, at the expense of the accused. Both powers are discretionary, and both depend on a conviction, so an acquittal leaves nothing for the section to operate on. The second power is a correction remedy rather than a punishment: its purpose is to put the truth before the same audience that read the libel, which is why the cost falls on the accused. Two limits are worth noting for a modern case. The section names newspapers, so it is not on its face a power to order material taken down from a website or a social media account, and a claimant wanting that will need to look elsewhere. And because Section 333 makes the offences in this Chapter compoundable, most defamation prosecutions end in a settlement and never reach the judgment on which this section depends. Section 332 applies across the Chapter, so it is available on a conviction under Section 326, Section 327 or Section 328.