Ruling adds to a run of high court decisions tightening the rules on how Punjab police search, arrest and gather evidence.
LAHORE: The Lahore High Court (LHC) has held that a police officer’s apprehension, without more, cannot justify searching a person or place without a warrant, reported on Tuesday, in a ruling that reinforces one of the oldest safeguards in Pakistan’s criminal procedure.
The decision means an officer who acts on a hunch or a vague fear rather than on recorded, reasonable grounds risks having the search, and anything found during it, challenged in court.
Under the Code of Criminal Procedure 1898, searches are ordinarily carried out under a warrant issued by a magistrate. Section 165 allows an officer in charge of a police station or an investigating officer to search without one only where there are reasonable grounds to believe something needed for an investigation will be found and cannot otherwise be obtained without undue delay, and the officer must first record those grounds in writing.
Section 103 requires searches of a place to be made in the presence of two or more respectable residents of the locality, who sign the list of items seized. Article 14 of the Constitution declares the dignity of man and, subject to law, the privacy of home inviolable.
Narcotics cases are a partial exception. The Control of Narcotic Substances Act 1997 disapplies the Section 103 witness requirement, which is why drug recoveries have generated much of the courts’ search-and-seizure case law.
In plain terms, police who stop someone or enter a home without a warrant must be able to show specific facts that justified acting on the spot, not just a feeling that something was wrong.
A search that fails that test can be challenged at trial, which matters most where the recovery is the main evidence, and can expose officers to departmental or criminal action. In an earlier case from Kasur, the high court directed the district police chief to register a case against officers who raided a family home without a warrant.
Under Section 103, the occupant of a place being searched is entitled to attend the search and, on request, to receive a copy of the witnessed list of items seized.
The ruling fits a series of recent decisions from Lahore on police powers. In July, Justice Muhammad Tariq Nadeem held that suspicion or a delayed supplementary statement, without independent evidence, could not justify an arrest, and ordered the inspector general to circulate the judgment to every district police officer.
In August, Justice Tariq Saleem Sheikh overturned a 14-year sentence in a hashish case because the prosecution could not prove a safe chain of custody for the drugs. In October, the high court barred arrests inside its premises and asked the police chief for a compliance report.
The court has also ordered a larger, uniform font for FIRs across Punjab to make records easier to read and harder to alter.
In June, the Peshawar High Court held that raiding a home without a warrant or concrete evidence violated the constitutional guarantees of dignity, liberty and privacy in Articles 4, 9 and 14.
Punjab Police have presented themselves as more citizen-focused this year, introducing timed slots for inquiries at police stations and announcing disciplinary action against hundreds of personnel over corruption.
Complaints of heavy-handed policing persist, however, including a Shahdara woman’s torture allegation backed by a medical report last month. Punjab Police have not commented publicly on how the ruling will be applied in the field.
Leave a Reply