Infringement of Right to Privacy by Naming and Shaming of Accused

Abstract

In what was broadly termed by the Government as the panacea for tackling the alleged rogue elements of the society, the Uttar Pradesh State Government decided to display the photographs, names and addresses of those accused of vandalism in Lucknow in December 2019 in the wake of the enactment of the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019. The public display of the personal data of the accused was supposedly intended at ‘naming and shaming’ and thus deterring the accused from committing crimes, an act which certainly flies in the face of human dignity. The role of human dignity in our constitutional scheme is essentially a normative one. It ensures the unity of Human Rights into one bracket. While human dignity serves as the normative basis for the constitutional rights, it also serves as the foundation of parameter that determines the scope of all the constitutional rights.