On 16 April 2026, the Delhi High Court in Harmeet Singh v. State (GNCT of Delhi) quashed a criminal case against a young man whose only “victim” – the seventeen-year-old he had married and had a child with – told the Court that she had suffered no harm and that prosecuting her husband would destroy her family. Prosecuted under India’s Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (“POCSO”), the case illustrates how an age-blind protective statute can re-victimise the very child it purports to shield. It does so by compelling the State to prosecute a relationship the affected minor herself disavows as harmful, thereby inflicting the secondary injury of criminal process upon the very person the law claims to protect.

The Architecture of Irrebuttable Incapacity

POCSO defines a “child” as any person under eighteen (including where both parties are minors) and criminalises all sexual contact with such a person. Sections 29 and 30 reverse the burden of proof: once foundational facts are established, the accused is presumed guilty. Consent is statutorily irrelevant; the minor’s voice is, by design, inaudible.

In practice, this has produced a paradox in some cases. Empirical work by Enfold and Project 39A shows that nearly one-quarter of POCSO prosecutions arise from consensual peer relationships, and that complainants decline to depose in roughly 82 per cent of such matters. The “victim” the Act purports to protect is, in a significant slice of its caseload, an autonomous young person whose intimate life has been involuntarily routed into the criminal justice system – by parents, by hospitals discharging mandatory reporting duties under Section 21, or by strangers.

The Evolving-Capacities Problem

This bright-line rule sits uneasily with India’s international obligations. Article 5 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child requires States Parties to respect the “evolving capacities of the child,” and Article 12 demands that her views be given “due weight in accordance with [her] age and maturity.” General Comment No. 20 specifically warns against criminalising consensual sexual activity between adolescents of similar developmental status.

Canada’s Criminal Code permits consensual relations involving fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds where the partner is less than five years older; the UK’s Sexual Offences Act 2003 sets sixteen as the age of consent. India is now an outlier among major common-law democracies in criminalising adolescent intimacy without nuance.

Re-Victimisation as a Human Rights Harm

Harmeet Singh deploys an elegant distinction between the de jure victim – constructed by statute – and the de facto victim, defined by Section 2(1)(y) of the BNSS as one who has actually suffered “loss or injury.” Where the latter is absent, prosecution becomes “an exercise leading to absurdity.” In this case specifically, pressing on would strip the mother of her partner and the household of its breadwinner – in the name of protecting the person it would impoverish.

This is re-victimisation in its precise sense: protective machinery operating as a second injury layered upon a first, imagined harm. It implicates the right to family life, the right to privacy recognised in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India, and the dignitary claim that an autonomous young woman is entitled to be heard about her own life.

Beyond Discretion: The Case for a Statutory Section 3A

Harmeet Singh follows the Supreme Court’s January 2026 invitation in State of U.P. v. Anurudh for the Union to legislate a “Romeo-Juliet” exemption. The judicial guardrails Justice Bhambhani articulates – volition, age gap, family stability, absence of coercion – are sensible but structurally inadequate. In Harmeet Singh, the Court quashed the FIR on finding no de facto victim, laying down eight non-exhaustive factors for courts to evaluate before doing so in similar cases – including the voluntariness of the relationship, the age gap, the presence of children, and the absence of violence. They operate only after arrest, custody, and often years of trial; they vary by postcode; and they are accessible only to those who can reach a High Court.

A statutory close-in-age exemption is the appropriate cure. A new Section 3A should provide a defence on the merits, available from the stage of framing of charge, where: (a) the complainant is at least sixteen; (b) the age gap does not exceed three years; (c) the accused establishes consent on the balance of probabilities; and (d) the accused was not in a position of trust or authority. The reverse burden preserves POCSO’s protective core; the cumulative conditions exclude exploitation; threshold availability prevents punishment-by-process.

Until Parliament acts, judges will continue to do equity case by case. Harmeet Singh is a humane decision. It is also a warning that human rights protection cannot rest indefinitely on judicial improvisation.