SC allows phone tapping as evidence under MCOCA

• Ordinary people are living in an atmosphere of fear and they feel helpless in the face of a menacing underworld. And they expect the state to establish order and ensure the safety of life and property of people.
• The apex court has said that the state has the right to make special laws to combat special organised crimes such as extortion, gun-running, money-laundering, terrorism and insurgency. Earlier, the Bombay High Court had struck down those very provisions on the ground that they violated the Central Telegraph Act.
• The judgment is being welcomed as something that will enable the police to track down those involved with the underworld and in activities that threaten our social fabric. It will surely help in bringing to book subversive elements bent on destroying public peace.
• There is a need to state explicitly the axioms of law — presumption of innocence, the right to privacy, the inviolability of fundamental rights — because the police force continues the colonial legacy of presuming guilt of the accused person. The very availability of laws which give unhindered power to the police makes the careful monitoring of those laws imperative.
• This problem is not confined to India and from the hidden US prisons of Guantanamo Bay to the human rights abuses of China, we have to fight the abuse of the power of law. The Supreme Court has allowed telephone-tapping in extreme cases. This ought not to become a licence to trample over individual rights and to harass those whose innocence is still within reasonable doubt.
• It is of utmost importance that the state should protect the life and property of citizens, but it cannot be armed with unqualified power that it can misuse to traumatise those very citizens. The tendency of the police to believe and act as agents of an absolutist state needs to be disabused. In a democracy, the state is under watch as well.
  

• The Bench comprising Chief Justice of India KG Balakrishnan, Justices RV Raveendran and MK Sharma said that special law is essential in dealing with increasing terrorism and organised crime. State Governments are responsible for cracking down organised crimes in their respective territories. It can not wait for the Central Government to come up with the special laws in restricting the mushrooming crimes.

•