| Abstract: |
The passage of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS) is a landmark moment for digital reform of criminal procedure law in India and in particular, by way of section 105, which seeks to ensure audio-video recording of every search and seizure operation. This is an attempt to make the process of enactment or operation of that constitutional command of fairness that Article 21 brought to our legal landscape and to bring that command into a technological world that has the highest incidence of allegations of evidence planting custodial misconduct and procedural opacity. But the mandate also raises a constitutional conundrum: videography advances transparency and corroborates the chain of custody, but is potentially in violation of the fundamental right to privacy, as recognized by K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017), the doctrine of informational self-determination; and the dignity-based jurisprudence unfolding from a close anal- expression to the sanctity of forensic and home-space. The research of this review paper is a meta-analysis through existing literature, case law and comparative legal frameworks (the US Fourth Amendment doctrine, the UK PACE (Code B), and Australia's body-worn camera case law) to analyze whether a regime mandating videography (BNSS) achieves a constitutionally proportionate balance between transparency and privacy. The title of the paper is “Are Body-Worn Cameras a Good Fit for India? A Fresh Legal Perspective”; it synthesizes the empirical evidence from Indian and international studies on body-worn cameras, analyzes how Section 105 BNSS coheres with Section 100 of the repealed Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, and whether the lack of precise data retention, access and destruction policies renders the provision constitutionally indefensible. This analysis reveals that while videography is procedurally salutary, the lack of substantive statutory framework regulating storage, encryption, third-party access, and judicial oversight causes substantial privacy externalities. The paper ends with suggestions for reconciling the transparency aim with proportionality principles recognized in Indian and international jurisprudence. |
