— By From Our bureau | Aug 03, 2017 12:07 am
Once the privacy question is settled by the Constitution Bench, the remaining issues related to Aadhaar will be heard by a smaller Bench of the Supreme Court.
New Delhi : A nine-judge Constitution Bench on Wednesday concluded a fortnight-long hearing on whether the right to privacy is deemed a fundamental right or not, but reserved the verdict without setting a date for delivering its verdict.
The said Bench was set up on July 18 and headed by Chief Justice Jagdish Singh Khehar. The Bench heard arguments over three days each week by lawyers representing the Centre, state governments and individual petitioners who contended that the collection of personal data under the Aadhaar infringed on the right to privacy.
Is the right to privacy a fundamental right guaranteed under the Indian Constitution was the limited question that had cropped up in the context of legal challenges to the Aadhaar number, which has now become the bedrock of government welfare programmes, tax administration network and online financial transactions.
Arguments to this effect were opened by senior advocate Gopal Subramanium with a strong contention that privacy was not a shade of a fundamental right but as one that was “inalienable and quintessential to the construction of the Constitution.” He insisted that the concept of privacy was embedded in the right to liberty/dignity.
Shyam Divan, a senior advocate appearing for one of the petitions, sought to define “privacy” as one that includes bodily integrity, personal autonomy, protection from state surveillance and freedom of dissent/movement/thought. Starting its arguments on July 26, the Centre for the first time conceded that privacy is certainly a fundamental right under the Constitution, but with a caveat that it is neither absolute nor could it be extended to “every aspect” of privacy.
Attorney general K.K. Venugopal submitted that privacy was at best a “sub-species of liberty and every aspect could not qualify as being fundamental in nature.”
Following this, four state governments — Karnataka, Punjab, West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh — and the Union Territory of Puducherry backed the constitutionality of the right to privacy. The states of Haryana and Kerala also joined the proceedings.
Even as the privacy debate raged in the Apex Court, the Information Technology Ministry appointed an expert group headed by former Supreme Court judge B.N. Srikrishna to put in place a data protection legislation in the wake of the leakage of the Aadhaar data.
The Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) that issues Aadhaar card providing Indian residents unique ID number took the stand through additional solicitor general Tushar Mehta that privacy need not be elevated as a fundamental right since it was already duly protected under statutes as a valuable common right.
Once the privacy question is settled by the Constitution Bench, the remaining issues related to Aadhaar will be heard by a smaller Bench of the Supreme Court. The first constitutional challenge to Aadhaar had come from former Karnataka High Court judge Justice K.S. Puttaswamy in 2013 and Divan has been appearing in the Aadhaar matters on behalf of him and others since then.
Various Benches of the Apex Court have been wriggling out from deciding the Aadhaar cases, all referring them to the Constitution Bench that went on since August 11, 2015. The CJI decided not to keep the matter hanging when Divan appeared along with Attorney General K.K. Venugopal to jointly plead for early establishment of the Constitution Bench.
He constituted a nine judge Bench to decide the matter since there were already two earlier Constitution Benches of eight judges in 1954 and six judges in 1964 ruling that the right to privacy is not a fundamental right.
http://www.freepressjournal.in/india/sc-reserves-verdict-on-right-to-privacy-as-fundamental-right/1114558
