Witness Protection: An Imperative for Criminal Justice

Abstract

India is one of the few democracies in the world that does not have a witness protection law in spite of such high crimes rates. The incompetence of the bureaucratic setup of democracy condemned the criminal justice system to being reduced to a mere namesake. This article attempts to provide an understanding of the condition of a witness in the criminal justice system. Without any witness protection laws, the courts have suffered from having to afford security and protection to the citizens that present themselves to testify before the court. Witnesses turn hostile in such a large number of cases and are exposed to threats and manipulation in the course of any criminal proceedings. The legislative efforts in the past have largely failed to provide any solution to this problem. While it is undoubtedly contented that witness protection is non-dispensable for a fair trial, this article explores the avenue of whether witness protection could be a judicial function. While most jurisdictions across the world run witness protection programmes through the executive, these programmes are wildly transparent and directly answerable to the government. However, in India, given the vast population of the land and the already available infrastructure of the courts and the concerns regarding a full-fledged witness protection programme expressed by various sources from the government over time, it takes considerable deliberation to vest power in the judiciary for an efficient criminal justice system. Nonetheless, at present, the 2018 scheme of witness protection is the only legislative entity available to the criminal justice system which is inexecutable and offers little relief to the problems.