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Rape violates right to life: Apex court

Read the Sotry - The Telegraph - Calcutta : Nation

The Supreme Court has equated rape to an offence violating the most basic of all fundamental rights — the “right to life” — guaranteed by the Constitution.

“It (rape) is a crime against basic human rights and is also violative of the victim’s most cherished of the fundamental rights, namely, the right to life contained in Article 21 of the Constitution of India,” a division bench of Justices Doraiswamy Raju and Arijit Passayat ruled on December 17.

The judgment thus quashed a Punjab and Haryana High Court order acquitting a rape accused on the grounds that the complaint was filed 17-18 days after the incident and that the victim had “habitual sexual intercourse”. The 14-year-old domestic help was raped by her employer at his house in his wife’s absence.

Signs of “previous sexual intercourse” found on a victim during a medical test “cannot, by any stretch of imagination, be a ground to acquit an alleged rapist”, the bench said. “The question which was required to be adjudicated was did the accused commit rape on the victim on the occasion complained of.”

“Even if the victim in a given case has been promiscuous in her sexual behaviour earlier, she has a right to refuse to submit herself to sexual intercourse to anyone and everyone because she is not a vulnerable object or prey for being sexually assaulted by anyone and everyone,” the judges observed in another significant aspect of today’s judgment.

“Even if it is hypothetically accepted that the victim had lost her virginity earlier, it did not and cannot in law give licence to any person to rape her. It is the accused who was on trial and not the victim,” the judges said.