Supreme Court Refuses To Interfere With Delhi HC Order Allowing Wife To Seek Husband's Hotel, CDR Records To Prove Adultery

The Supreme Court refused to interfere with the Delhi High Court ruling permitting a wife to summon hotel records and the call detail records (CDRs) of her husband in matrimonial proceedings to substantiate allegations of adultery.

A partial court working days bench of Justice Manmohan and Justice K. Vinod Chandran dismissed the appeal filed by the husband, declining to interfere with the concurrent findings of the Family Court and High Court regarding the production of the hotel records and call detail records for consideration by the Family Court.

The High Court held that the right to privacy is not absolute and must be balanced against a spouse's right to prove allegations in matrimonial proceedings. Since the wife had no other effective means to establish her claim of adultery, it upheld the Family Court's direction to summon the husband's hotel records and CDRs in a sealed cover to protect confidentiality while enabling adjudication.

“I am therefore of the considered view that when in a case like the present, when a wife seeks the help of the Court for procuring evidence which would go a long way to prove adultery on the part of her husband, the Court must step in; this would be in consonance with Section 14 of the Family Courts Act which gives a leeway to the Court to consider evidence which may be not admissible or relevant under the Indian Evidence Act.”, the High Court observed.

Background

The parties were married on December 4, 1998, and have a daughter born in 2000. The wife instituted divorce proceedings under Section 13(1)(i) of the Hindu Marriage Act, alleging cruelty and adultery. She claimed that her husband had stayed at the Hotel Fairmont, Jaipur, between April 29 and May 1, 2022, with another woman and her daughter.

To substantiate the allegations, the wife initially sought preservation of the hotel's CCTV footage. However, since the footage was no longer available owing to the hotel's retention policy, she moved an application seeking production of the hotel's booking records, identity documents of the occupants, payment details relating to the room, and the husband's call detail records for a specified period.

The Family Court allowed the application and directed that the records be produced before it in a sealed cover. The High Court upheld the Family Court's order, observing:

"The petitioner's (husband's) claim is based solely on the right to privacy which, as held in K.S. Puttuswamy (supra) and Joseph Shine (supra) is not an absolute right; on the other hand, the respondent's prayer is based not only on morality but also on specific rights granted under the Hindu Marriage Act and the Family Courts Act. I, therefore, have no hesitation in holding that the respondent's right must prevail and therefore, find no reason to interfere with the impugned orders. The learned Family Court by way of the impugned orders has sought records which pertain only to the respondent's husband and not to his friend or her daughter. There is, therefore, no question of their right of privacy being violated in any manner."

Against this decision, the husband moved to the Supreme Court

At the outset, the bench found no reason to interfere with the High Court's decision. Accordingly, the appeal was dismissed.

Case No.: Civil Appeal No. 400 of 2024