In taking this view, Justice Rajagopala Ayyangar, speaking for a majority of five judges, relied upon the judgment of Justice Frankfurter, speaking for the US Supreme Court in Wolf v Colorado, which held:
"The security of one's privacy against arbitrary intrusion by the police ... is basic to a free society... We have no hesitation in saying that were a State affirmatively to sanction such police incursion into privacy it would run counter to the guarantee of the Fourteenth
Amendment."
While the Court observed that the Indian Constitution does not contain a guarantee similar to the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, it proceeded to hold that:
"Nevertheless, these extracts would show that an unauthorised intrusion into a person‘s home and the disturbance caused to him thereby, is as it were the violation of a common law right of a man an ultimate essential of ordered liberty, if not of the very concept of civilisation. An English Common Law maxim asserts that "every man‘s house is his castle‖ and in Semayne case [5 Coke 91: 1 Sm LC (13th Edn) 104 at p. 105] where this was applied, it was stated that "the house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress as well as for his defence against injury and violence as for his repose‖. We are not unmindful of the fact that Semayne case [(1604) 5 Coke 91: 1 Sm LC (13th Edn) 104 at p. 105] was concerned with the law relating to executions in England, but the passage extracted has a validity quite apart from the context of the particular decision. It embodies an abiding principle which transcends mere protection of property rights and expounds a concept of "personal liberty" which does not rest on any element of feudalism or on any theory of freedom which has ceased to be of value."
Source: Excerpt taken from the Judgment delivered by a 9 Judge bench of the Supreme Court in 2017 and authored by Dr. D. Y. Chandrachud. J.
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