Cyber Offences And Digital Jurisdiction: Interpreting “Territorial Jurisdiction” In The Digital Age Under Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita
- IJLLR Journal
- 53 minutes ago
- 2 min read
Aritra Saha, BBA LLB, SOA National Institute of Law, Bhubaneswar, Odisha
ABSTRACT
The cyber world has brought the world as a global village in communication and trade but has also presented a major problem to legal systems in dealing with cyber crimes. The traditional jurisdictional principles that focus on a geographical area have difficulty dealing with borderless and anonymous cybercrime. It is against these developing cyber realities that the critical paper is based on the concept of the territorial jurisdiction according to the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS). It explains the drawbacks of the classical principles of jurisdiction in penalizing digital crimes and what BNS can accomplish to revise and reformulate the law to deal with cybercrimes that afflict India. The research situates Indian legal provisions such as the Information Technology act and the procedural laws with a focus on the principle of extraterritorial jurisdiction which has been bestowed on the cyber offences whereby the harm has been committed in the Indian territory. It goes on to contrast the international law tools like the Budapest Convention and the new United Nations one on Cybercrime to show the global ways of cooperating to address jurisdictional issues. Indian and other jurisdictional landmark judicial cases are examined to find the ways in which courts approach the issue of territorial jurisdiction in cyberspace, and the significance of the effects doctrine and protective principles. Understanding the obstacles to synchronization of jurisdictions, cold cyber space, and anonymity of technologies, this paper gives an appropriate proposal of improvements to law with a set of recommendations: jurisdictional regulation in BNS, increased global collaboration, greater mutual legal assistance agreements, and extra capacity building in policing.
Keywords: Cyber offences; digital jurisdiction; territorial jurisdiction; Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita; cybercrime; international law; cross-border enforcement.
