Updated By: LatestGKGS Desk
Constitution of India: Article 21 Ensure Personal liberty Right to life
Article 21 ensures every person right to life and personal liberty Right to Life.
Both the terms, life, and personal liberty has been given a very expansive and wide amplitude covering a variety of rights.
The right to life is undoubtedly the most fundamental of all rights. All other rights add quality to the life in question and depend on the pre-existence of life itself for their operation. As human rights can only attach to living beings, one might expect the right to life itself to be in some sense primary, since none of the other rights would have any value or utility without it. There would have been no Fundamental Rights worth mentioning if Article 21 had been interpreted in its original sense.
The expression of personal liberty does not only mean freedom from:
- Arrest
- Detention
- False or Wrongful confinement
The Supreme Court of India held that it encompasses those rights and privileges that have long been recognized as being essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. The expression procedure established by law has also been a subject matter of interpretation. It means the procedure laid down by statute or procedure prescribed by the law of the State.
The fundamental right to life and personal liberty which has become an inexhaustible source of many other rights and mentioned under the following subheads:
- Right to Live with Human Dignity
- Right against sexual harassment at workplace
- Right to clean environment
- Right to know or right to be informed
- Right of prisoners
- Right against illegal detention
- Right to Legal Aid
- Right to speedy trial
- Right to compensation
- Right to Privacy
- Disclosure of dreadful diseases
