In a significant ruling that clarifies the legal boundaries between prostitution-related offences and human trafficking, the Telangana High Court has held that merely being present in or around a brothel is not enough to prosecute a person under trafficking laws.
The court has noted that criminal liability under Section 370A (2) IPC can be put on someone who knows that he had engaged the services of a trafficked person or someone who had reasonable grounds to assume so.
This decision, as reported by The Times of India, has come after a division bench led by Justices K Lakshman and BR Madhusudhan Rao heard 120 plus criminal petitions filed against cases related to prostitution.
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Court clarifies scope of trafficking law
The petitioners included students, businesspersons and private-sector employees who had been booked in separate cases by police. While some were accused of being customers of sex workers, others argued that they had merely been present near brothels and had no direct role in any illegal activity.
Police had invoked provisions of the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act along with sections of the IPC, now corresponding to Sections 143 and 144 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), alleging that the accused had encouraged or facilitated prostitution.
The petitioners contended that customers seeking sexual services could not automatically be treated as traffickers or prosecuted under laws designed to combat human trafficking.
The state, however, argued that Section 370A(2) was enacted to target the demand side of trafficking and could extend to customers in certain circumstances.
Knowledge of trafficking key to liability
Drawing from earlier cases of the Supreme Court, the High Court ruled that a person cannot be considered a trafficker just because he or she sought to get sexual services. The Court pointed out that according to the law, there must be a sufficient amount of evidence showing that the customer was aware, or there were some indications about the fact that the sex worker was a trafficked person.
The judges emphasised that it is only justified to criminally prosecute the person according to Section 370A(2), if his or her knowledge or suspicion about the situation could be proved.
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As explained in the judgment, things like communications with pimps, brokers, facilitators or brothel managers and statements made by the sex workers could be used as evidence that the person had enough grounds for suspecting that the prostitute was a victim of human trafficking.
The judgment establishes some clear differences between trafficking crimes and those connected to prostitution. Legally speaking, this judgment is expected to affect law enforcement authorities' approach to cases of that kind.
FAQs
Q1. What did the Telangana High Court rule?
The court ruled that merely being present at a brothel is not sufficient to prosecute someone under trafficking laws.
Q2. When can a customer be prosecuted under Section 370A(2)?
A customer can be prosecuted if there is evidence that they knew, or had reason to believe, that the sex worker involved had been trafficked.
