Facts of the case

The wife had filed for divorce alleging cruelty and adultery. She claimed that her husband had stayed at the Fairmont Hotel in Jaipur with another woman in April 2022. She initially sought preservation of CCTV footage from the hotel. By the time she approached the court, however, the footage had already been deleted under the hotel’s retention policy.

The wife then moved the Family Court seeking booking records, identification documents of persons staying, payment details relating to the room and her husband’s call detail records for the relevant period.

The Family Court allowed the request and directed that the records be produced before it in sealed cover. The husband challenged the order before the Delhi HC, arguing that disclosure of such information would violate his right to privacy.

The court rejected the challenge, observing that the wife was “only trying to seek production of evidence which she reasonably believes will prove her charge of adultery which by its very nature can be inferred only from circumstances”.

The court further held that where a spouse seeks evidence that may help establish allegations of adultery, “the Court must step in” saying that such an approach is consistent with the powers provided to Family Courts under the law.

Legal framework

At the heart of the case is Section 14 of the Family Courts Act, 1984. Unlike ordinary civil and criminal courts, Family Courts are not strictly bound by the evidentiary requirements of the Evidence Act.

Section 14 states that a Family Court may receive “any report, statement, documents, information or matter” that may assist it in effectively resolving a dispute, whether or not it would otherwise be admissible under the Evidence Act.

The Delhi HC described Section 14 as a provision that gives Family Courts “very wide powers” to receive evidence that may assist in resolving matrimonial disputes. The HC also relied on the SC orders of KS Puttaswamy and Joseph Shine, noting that the right to privacy is not absolute.

It said that in the facts of the case, the wife’s need to obtain evidence relevant to her allegations outweighed the husband’s privacy objections, particularly since the records sought related only to him and were to be produced before the court in sealed cover rather than being made public.

The court also noted that adultery continues to be recognised as a ground for divorce under the Hindu Marriage Act, even though it is no longer a criminal offence following the decision in Joseph Shine.

Previous ruling

The Supreme Court bench of Justices BV Nagarathna and Satish Chandra Sharma in July 2025 held that secretly recorded conversations can be admitted into evidence in family disputes even in divorce proceedings, despite Section 122 of the Evidence Act which protects communications made between spouses during marriage.

The bench read Section 122 narrowly. It held that “the phone on which the conversation was recorded is no different from an eavesdropper” whose testimony would not attract the privilege. It said that the provision was only meant to protect the “sanctity of marriage and not the right to privacy of the individuals involved.”

The SC balanced the right to privacy with the evidentiary value as it rejected the argument that admitting secretly recorded conversations would encourage surveillance within marriage. “If the marriage has reached a stage where spouses are actively snooping on each other, that is in itself a symptom of a broken relationship and denotes a lack of trust between them,” the court said.