In yet another splendid ruling, the Supreme Court called privacy a fundamental right because it is vital to the right of life. The SC's nine-judge bench unanimously ruled that the “Right to Privacy is an integral part of Right to Life and Personal Liberty guaranteed in Article 21 of the Constitution.”
The move comes as a hit to Modi Government's Aadhaar card which is currently forcing citizens to give a sample of their fingerprints and iris scan. A five-judge bench will now test the validity of the identity card on the touchstone of privacy as a fundamental right. The nine-judge bench overruled previous judgements on the issue- an eight-judge bench judgement in the MP Sharma case and a six-judge bench judgement in Kharak Singh case- both which ruled that privacy is not a fundamental right.
Senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan, party to the case, said, “The judgement read out so far only says that the right to privacy is a fundamental right, protected by Article 21 (of the constitution on the right to life and personal liberty).” Constitutional status of right to privacy arose in a bunch of petitions, led by retired HC judge KS Puttaswamy in 2012, challenging the biometric data-enabled Aadhaar ID for citizens. Petitioners included first Chairperson of National Commission for Protection of Child Rights and Magsaysay awardee Shanta Sinha, feminist researcher Kalyani Sen Menon and others.
“Privacy, even if assumed to be a fundamental right, consists of a large number of sub-species... It will be constitutionally impermissible to declare each and every instance of privacy a fundamental right. Privacy has varied connotations when examined from different aspects of liberties. If the SC wants to declare it a fundamental right, then it probably has to determine separately the various aspects of privacy and the extent of violation that could trigger a constitutional remedy,” Venugopal said.
