Judiciary proactively responded to emerging fraudulent schemes like digital arrest: CJI

Chief Justice of India Surya Kant has said the Indian judiciary has proactively responded to emerging fraudulent schemes such as digital arrest scams rather than waiting for Parliament to address them.

In his closing address at the 43rd International Symposium on Economic Crime in London on Saturday, the CJI said the Supreme Court had recently taken suo motu cognisance of the "digital arrest" scam, in which fraudsters impersonate police officers, judicial officials, or bureaucrats over video calls to dupe citizens.

"In response, the court has directed the Union and the states to evaluate the extent of this problem and has called for the establishment of a distinct offence, with penalties proportionate to the harm inflicted," he said.

"This exemplifies a broader pattern: an Indian Judiciary that proactively responds to emerging fraudulent schemes, rather than waiting for Parliament to address them," the CJI said.

He said when one looks at India's modern response to economic crime, it is best understood not as a single statute but as a layered architecture, built deliberately over successive decades, in which legislation, institutions and judicial doctrine are each made to do distinct work.

The CJI referred to the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA), 2002, and the Fugitive Economic Offenders Act, 2018.

"I must note that these are not infallible mechanisms. Numerous individuals have alleged misuse of the PMLA process by investigating authorities, including claims of arrests made without articulated reasons, and of custody extended beyond what the existing facts appear to justify. In each such instance, the judiciary has intervened to rectify the situation," he said.

Justice Kant referred to the apex court's verdict holding that grounds for arrest must be provided to the accused in writing, rather than merely read aloud.

"Furthermore, in Arvind Kejriwal versus Central Bureau of Investigation, a decision I had the opportunity to author, the court upheld the legality of the arrest but nonetheless granted bail, based on the principle that prolonged pre-trial detention should not be transformed into punishment under a different guise," he said.

The CJI said what had remained consistent through the decades, despite legal and technological developments, was the apex court's insistence that due process, proportionality and the presumption of innocence remain the guiding principles of its jurisprudence.

Referring to the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, 2016, the CJI said it runs alongside criminal proceedings and the Indian justice delivery system has grown increasingly comfortable authorising parallel civil recovery even where a criminal trial remains protracted.

"And finally, like every nation represented in this hall, India has learned through hard experience that Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties with other countries, however imperfect their machinery and modalities, bring a recovered asset home far more reliably than extradition ever does. Illicit wealth, after all, rarely stays where it was stolen," he said.

The CJI said if global estimates on money laundering were even roughly accurate, the world launders enough money in a single year to buy every one of the eight billion people alive on the planet a modest laptop, and still have some change left over.

"And of that immense tide of illicit wealth, by the most generous reckoning, less than one unit in a hundred is ever recovered," he said.

The CJI said Indian statesman and teacher Kautilya had, back in the second century BC, written in his treatise on statecraft, the 'Arthashastra', about distinct ways in which an official of the State might siphon away its treasury.

"He then offers a line that every compliance officer present will recognise across twenty-three centuries: it is as impossible for an official to handle the king's revenue and take nothing from it as it is akin to holding honey or poison upon the tip of the tongue and taste neither," he said.

The CJI said the very nature of illicit wealth and economic crime was that neither honoured the sovereignty that otherwise shields our legal structures from foreign interference.

"Let this Symposium's answer be that vigilance, cooperation and the rule of law thwart fraudulence in equal and, I hope, escalating measure," he said.

"In closing, I would say this: the measure of this Symposium's success will not be the eloquence with which we described the problem this week, but the diligence with which each of us, returning to our own jurisdictions, endeavours to put an end to it," he said.