Now Reading: BNSS empowers police to attach proceeds of crime with magisterial nod
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BNSS empowers police to attach proceeds of crime with magisterial nod
The new Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) introduces a clear legal distinction between seizure and attachment of property, ending decades of improvisation under the CrPC. Section 106 BNSS replicates the old seizure…
The new Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) introduces a clear legal distinction between seizure and attachment of property, ending decades of improvisation under the CrPC. Section 106 BNSS replicates the old seizure power for evidentiary purposes, while new Section 107 BNSS gives investigating agencies the power to attach proceeds of crime, but only with a magistrate's sanction.
Under the CrPC, police could only seize property under Section 102, a provision originally meant for evidence. The Supreme Court in the 1999 Tapas D Neogy case stretched that section to allow freezing of bank accounts to preserve assets for eventual restitution, because no domestic attachment mechanism existed. The BNSS fills that gap: Section 107 allows attachment of property believed to be derived from criminal activity, with magisterial oversight and an ex parte interim order option in urgent cases.
The Kerala High Court in Headstar Global Pvt. Ltd. v. State of Kerala (2025) noted that Section 107 BNSS was specifically designed to cure the CrPC's lacuna in providing for attachment of domestic proceeds of crime. The change has major implications for debit freezing of bank accounts in financial and cybercrime investigations.
Indian Opinion Analysis
The BNSS resolves a long-standing tension between a procedural code meant for evidence and a court-ordered workaround that turned seizure into quasi-attachment. The Supreme Court's Tapas D Neogy ruling in 1999 was a pragmatic fix, but it lacked statutory safeguards such as magisterial review and a defined test for when attachment is justified. Section 107 now supplies both. The key shift is procedural: investigators must go to a magistrate, not act unilaterally. The next test will be how magistrates apply the 'reason to believe' standard and whether they demand more than a boilerplate FIR. The Kerala High Court's Headstar judgment, the first reported reading of Section 107, signals that courts will enforce the new boundary strictly.
Source: livelaw.in
This brief was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
