Right to Privacy

In Justice Qazi Faez Isa, the case arose when a Presidential Reference was filed against Justice Qazi Faez Isa of the Supreme Court, alleging that he had
failed to disclose foreign properties owned by his wife and children in his wealth statements. The Assets Recovery Unit sent a summary to the Prime Minister containing the property and tax records of Justice Isa. These were challenged to have been collected through illegal state surveillance.

Held: Justice Mansoor Ali Shah in his additional note emphasized that unlawful state surveillance violates constitutional rights to privacy, dignity, and personal liberty, framing privacy as essential to human freedom. He warned that unchecked intelligence agencies pose a grave threat to democracy, stressing the need for strict legal compliance to protect citizens and uphold the rule of law.

Selected Passages:
“Privacy therefore affirms the agency and autonomy of the individual and the right of every person to have the freedom and liberty to live a life of dignity. Privacy requires that all information about a person is fundamentally his own, only for him to communicate or retain for himself. The concept of private life includes the right to personal autonomy, personal development and the right to establish and develop relationships with other human beings and with the outside world.

Privacy affirms the agency and autonomy of the individual… ‘Arguing that you don’t care about privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.’ This is a cherished constitutional value

Covert surveillance and interception are offensively intrusive investigative tools… Any unconstitutional intrusion and unlawful collection of reels of unauthorized
private data can make any agency a Frankenstein – indestructible and uncontrollable… tricks of a totalitarian State and not the ways of an elected Government of a constitutional democracy