New DelhiThe Supreme Court on Tuesday said that a law cannot be declared unconstitutional just because there is a chance of it being misused during the hearing of the crucial Aadhaar card petition.
The five-judge constitution bench made the above statement in reference to senior advocate Kapil Sibal’s argument that the 12-digit biometric-data based Unique Identification number can compromise with the privacy of the citizens.
Sibal invoked Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s statement at the World economic Forum meeting to substantiate his argument.
” A country which controls data, controls the world,” Modi had said.
“I agree with the Prime Minister,” Sibal said, underlining that the court’s decision to allow the Aadhaar law to succeed would “have a far-reaching effects” and “affect future generations”.
The Supreme Court bench is hearing a batch of petitions against Aadhaar, the earliest of which was filed back in 2012 and contends that the scheme violates the fundamental right to privacy.
A 2016 law that empowers the government to force people to enrol for the number to access not just public benefits and services has also been challenged.
“Aadhaar is nothing but right to Information for the state,” Sibal said, also asserting that “information is power and if the power is given to state, it will use it like never before”.
The former union minister also suggested that Aadhaar’s utility for national security is not as important as it is made out to be.
“Aadhaar can’t identify whether a person is a terrorist or a money launderer unless you have information of the crime,” he said.
However, Justice DY Chandrachud was not convinced by Sibal’s argument, drawing on a number of previous Supreme Court judgements that state “mere possibility of misuse will not lead to striking down a legislation”.
To this, Sibal replied that the difference between these previous judgements and the Aadhaar law is the fact that the latter is already being misused or abused everyday.
“The power of misuse is no ground to declare a law unconstitutional. Striking down a legislation is a problem for us,” Justice Chandrachud retaliated, “For the court to strike down a law, “you must say (establish) that it is a colourable (arbitrary) legislation.”
Justice Chandrachud also wondered if the law itself was expected to provide the level of risk.
“In the absence of technologically assured safe environment what level of risk is acceptable and what level of risk not acceptable. How can this court determine?” he said.
Sibal said the state itself may not want to misuse a citizen’s data but “once the data is available in the public domain, it can be misused by private players. The data is available with banks and telecom service providers. Once you make the data public, it can’t be retrieved.”
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