6.3 Defenses against Disclosure

The accused discloser's shield-wall (the media's relevant defenses): Authorization: the disclosure was permitted — by the official with the power, by the law's requirement (a court order; the parliamentary summons); No classification's validity: the information was not validly classified — the label without the power, the classification hiding wrongdoing (the RTI Act's anti-abuse principle; the NIC's review as the forum); Already public: the information was published before — the secret already lost; the classification cannot re-seal the public record; Good faith and public duty: the disclosure made in the honest performance of duty (the official reporting wrongdoing upward — the internal-report defense) — the good faith's mitigation face; No knowledge: the discloser did not know and could not reasonably know of the classification (the unlabeled document passed in the ordinary course); The public-interest override (the developing defense): the disclosure's public benefit outweighing the harm — the whistle-blower's constitutional argument (6.4) — the honest position: not yet a clear statutory defense to the criminal charge in Nepal, but the proportionality reading (Unit 2.5) and the RTI Act's principles press toward it.