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Hyderabad: The Telangana High Court has ruled that secretly recording a spouse’s phone calls without their consent breaches the fundamental right to privacy and cannot be used as evidence in matrimonial cases, a position that runs contrary to the Supreme Court’s verdict a year earlier, holding that such recordings are admissible in matrimonial disputes.

Justice Namavarapu Rajeshwar Rao, dismissing two civil revision petitions on July 11, held that recording a spouse’s conversations without consent amounts to a violation of the right to privacy under Article 21 of the Constitution, and that such recordings are inadmissible in the absence of consent.

The petitions had been filed by a husband challenging a trial court’s refusal to admit certain documents, including call recordings, in his divorce case filed on the ground of cruelty.

Documents held irrelevant to cruelty plea

Apart from rejecting the call recordings, the High Court also held that other documents the husband sought to place on record, such as medical records, payment proofs, air tickets, photographs and money transfer records, did not support his case. The court observed that these papers instead pointed to a cordial and happy married life between the couple and upheld the trial court’s order rejecting the applications.

The trial court had earlier turned down the husband’s plea on the ground that the recordings lacked the mandatory certification required under Section 65-B of the Evidence Act, and that there was no clarity on whether the original device was available or whether any certificate had been sought from a competent authority.

Contrasts with Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling

The Telangana High Court verdict comes almost exactly a year after the Supreme Court, in July 2025, took the opposite view in Vibhor Garg vs Neha, holding that a spouse’s secretly recorded phone conversations are admissible as evidence in matrimonial proceedings.

A bench of Justices BV Nagarathna and Satish Chandra Sharma had then ruled that the spousal privilege under Section 122 of the Evidence Act was not absolute and had to be read along with the exceptions carved into the provision, which permit disclosure of spousal communication in proceedings between the two spouses. 

The bench had held that Section 122 dealt with evidentiary privilege between spouses and did not concern itself with the right to privacy under Article 21.

The apex court’s ruling had set aside a Punjab and Haryana High Court order that disallowed a husband from using a compact disc of his wife’s recorded calls in a cruelty case, with the High Court holding that the recording, made without her knowledge, violated her right to privacy. The Supreme Court had reasoned that once a marriage had deteriorated to the point where one spouse was monitoring the other, it reflected a broken relationship and that the right to produce relevant evidence and secure a fair trial had to be weighed against such privacy concerns.

The Telangana High Court’s latest ruling has, without directly engaging with the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the matter, arrived at a divergent conclusion on the same question of law, potentially setting the stage for further judicial clarity on the issue.