Policing and the inviolability of the home

EDITORIAL: The recent judgment of the Peshawar High Court is a timely reminder that constitutional rights cannot be sacrificed at the altar of moral policing.

By granting bail to two women and a man arrested during a police raid in Mansehra, the court has reaffirmed a cardinal principle of constitutional governance: the state must act strictly within the bounds of law, even when dealing with allegations that evoke social disapproval or moral sensitivities. In an aspiring democracy, legality—not moral conjecture—must guide the exercise of state power.

Articles 4, 9 and 14 of the Constitution collectively provide a robust safeguard against arbitrary state action. They guarantee every citizen the right to be treated in accordance with law, protect life and liberty, and uphold the inviolability of human dignity and the privacy of the home. These protections are not contingent upon public approval of an individual’s conduct; rather, they exist precisely to protect citizens from unlawful intrusion and abuse of authority.

As the court rightly observed, Sections 371-A and 371-B of the Pakistan Penal Code are aimed at combating trafficking, sale, purchase and commercial sexual exploitation of human beings. They cannot be stretched to criminalise the mere presence of adult men and women in a private residence.

The record in the present instance revealed no allegation of trafficking, commercial gain, exchange of money or organised prostitution. In the absence of these essential ingredients, invoking the said PPC provisions amounted to a clear misapplication of criminal law and underscored the dangers of using serious offences to prosecute conduct that does not fall within their ambit.

Equally significant is the court’s concern over the manner in which the raid was conducted. Entering a private home without a search warrant and without observing the procedural safeguards prescribed by law raise profound legality issues.

Privacy of the home is not a technicality; it is a cornerstone of personal liberty and human dignity. If law-enforcement agencies are permitted to intrude into private spaces on the basis of anonymous complaints, suspicion or unverified information, constitutional guarantees become vulnerable to abuse.

The court was therefore right to emphasise that protections afforded by Articles 4, 9 and 14 cannot be overridden through arbitrary police action carried out in the name of combating immorality.

The judgment also draws attention to a troubling tendency to conflate alleged moral impropriety with criminal conduct. Courts have repeatedly warned that law enforcement must not become an instrument of social surveillance or moral regulation.

The criminal justice system exists to address legally defined offences, not to enforce subjective notions of morality. At a time when concerns about abuse of authority and encroachments on civil liberties are growing, this ruling reinforces an essential constitutional principle: no citizen’s dignity, reputation or privacy may be compromised except in accordance with law. For that reason, the judgment deserves appreciation as a principled affirmation of the rule of law and fundamental rights.

Copyright Business Recorder, 2026