All You Need to Know About House Arrest

In News: Supreme Court has allowed ‘house arrest’ for human rights activist Gautam Navlakha.

• An accused in the Bhima Koregaon case and has been in jail since April 2020.
• He suffers from multiple ailments.
• He moved the Supreme Court after the Bombay High Court rejected his plea seeking transfer to house arrest on account of his medical condition.

What is House Arrest?

• House arrest—also known as home confinement or home detention—is the act of confining a person to specified premises that are not a regular jail.
• These premises can be the person’s own home or someone else’s, subject to approval by the authorities.
• House arrest is seen as an alternative to confinement in jail either during trial or after sentencing, which can be used in the case of certain categories of prisoners with specific medical or other needs, or those who are not deemed dangerous.
• House arrest is allowed under specific conditions that are peculiar to each prisoner. They almost always include restrictions on travel and meeting people, and may include electronic surveillance of the prisoner by means of a wearable tracking device.
• The Code of Criminal Procedure does not mention house arrest.
  • Section 5 of the National Security Act, 1980, empowers the state to detain an individual “in such place and under such conditions…as the appropriate Government may, by general or special order, specify”.
  • The detained person may be “removed from one place of detention to another place of detention, whether within the same State or in another State, by order of the appropriate Government”.

Source: The Indian Express