The Supreme Court of India on Thursday said that adultery can’t be a criminal offence and the adultery law is also in violation of privacy right to some extent.
A five-judge Constitution bench, including the Chief Justice of India Dipak Misra is pronouncing its judgment on the validity of section 497 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), which criminalises adultery, on Thursday, here is a primer on the issues at stake.
Drafted in 1860, the colonial era law criminalises adultery with up to five years imprisonment, while defining the perpetrator as “whoever has sexual intercourse with a person who is and whom he knows or has reason to believe to be the wife of another man, without the consent or connivance of that man, such sexual intercourse not amounting to the offence of rape, is guilty of the offence of adultery”
