When police picked up former chief justice Cholendra Shumsher Rana from his Maharajgunj residence at around 2am on September 27, one item they appeared particularly interested in was his phone.

As soon as officers brought Rana to the Metropolitan Crime Division in Teku, they took the device. Rana was kept in the office of SSP Santosh Khadka and offered tea and snacks. When they “released” him about 12 hours later, they returned his phone.

An official involved in the case acknowledged that the phone had been taken. Rana has neither publicly commented on his detention nor said anything about the phone or what happened to it.

Police have not explained why the phone of someone brought in for his own security needed to be taken, or whether anything on it was examined.

Rana’s case raises a broader question about a practice that has appeared in several recent police investigations: when police take someone’s phone, what gives them the authority to do so, and what are they entitled to do with it?

When journalist Kishor Shrestha was arrested from his Kusunti residence on August 12, police officers immediately asked where his phone was.

Shrestha, who had already learned that police were looking for him, had not taken his old phone with him. When officers could not find it, they searched his house that night, according to his lawyer Badri Bhusal.

“They seized computers, laptops and other digital devices, including digital material belonging to Shrestha's daughters,” Bhusal told Kantipur. “The intention seemed to be less about arresting him and proceeding with legal action and more about looking at his phone to find out what his source was.”

Shrestha had been arrested on the basis of a complaint by Amarkant Chaudhary, a lawmaker from Saptari, after his newspaper published a report containing a photograph of a young woman.

According to Bhusal, police did not need digital material belonging to other members of the family to investigate the matter. The court later ordered the return of the materials seized from the residence.

A similar pattern has emerged in cases involving Durga Prasai, a medical businessman and political activist.

When police searched his Bhaktapur residence on August 20, they seized six phones, a laptop, and a CCTV box.

“Why take everyone’s phones when the investigation concerns something said in a public place?” a member of Prasai's secretariat asked.

Prasai has also complained that police repeatedly took phones belonging to him, his wife, and people who worked around him.

“They have taken 25 or 30 phones when they arrested me once,” he said at a press conference. “They took my wife’s phone. They took the phones of the boys who work for me.”

The practice has not been limited to public figures.

During protests in Taplejung by the Mukumlung conservation campaign against a proposed cable-car project, police seized phones from 18 protesters. After the protesters spent 27 days in custody without getting their phones back, they submitted a written request for their return on March 21, 2025.

These cases raise a question that goes beyond whether phones are useful to investigators. What offence justifies taking a device? What legal authority allows police to examine it? And what safeguards apply to the information they obtain?

The Supreme Court has previously confronted the question of police access to private telecommunications data.

After Supreme Court Justice Rana Bahadur Bam was shot and killed in Lalitpur on May 31, 2012, police obtained a large volume of telephone call and SMS information as part of their investigation.

When the move was challenged, a bench led by then-chief justice Kalyan Shrestha and justice Devendra Gopal Shrestha held that private telephone and SMS information falls within the constitutional protection of privacy and that interference with such information requires a clear legal basis.

The case involved call and SMS records rather than the contents of a smartphone seized from an individual. But the principle is relevant: the usefulness of information to investigators does not, by itself, remove legal protections over private communications.

A call-detail record can show investigators who communicated with whom and when. A phone can reveal much more — what a person said, read, searched for, photographed, bought, received, stored, or discussed.

It may also contain private conversations, photographs, financial records, location information, emails, search histories, professional correspondence, and information about people who have never been suspected of any crime.

Nepal's Constitution protects the privacy of a person's body, residence, property, documents, data, correspondence, and matters relating to their character. Article 28 says those matters are inviolable except in accordance with law.

The Privacy Act, 2018, provides more specific protections for electronic information. It protects personal information, documents, correspondence, and data held electronically and prohibits unauthorised access to such information.

The Act also protects electronic communications from being read, viewed, made available to others, published, or broadcast without authorisation. It provides exceptions for criminal investigations where the person consents or an authorised official acts under prevailing law.

The law therefore does not prohibit police from accessing private information in every circumstance. But possession of a phone does not automatically answer whether they can search everything stored inside it.

A police officer working in a case section of a Kathmandu Valley police unit said the two acts are distinct.

“A phone may be taken to prevent someone under investigation from leaking information or destroying evidence,” the officer said. “But that does not automatically give police the right to examine its contents.”

“Asking for a password, unlocking the device, viewing photographs and videos, reading messages, examining search histories, extracting social-media information, or recovering deleted material are separate acts,” the officer added.

Senior advocate Dinesh Tripathi says a mobile phone is directly connected to a person's private life and that police need a legal basis to access the information stored on it.

“For serious criminal investigations, it is mandatory to obtain permission from the court,” Tripathi said. “The Constitution also guarantees the right to privacy. Even obtaining call-detail records requires judicial authorisation in circumstances governed by law.”

Nepal Police spokesperson Abi Narayan Kafle offered a lengthy explanation of how phones can provide important evidence and investigative leads, but stopped short of explaining what criminal investigation Rana was facing.

“I am not aware that the police had taken the former chief justice's phone,” he said.

A senior police officer involved in the Rana case said officials at the Prime Minister's Office had accused Rana of attempting to interfere in judicial affairs, proceedings, and pending cases.

“Pressure to take action against Rana increased after Prime Minister Balendra Shah and his political adviser Kumar Ben returned from a visit to the United Nations,” said the officer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retribution.

“Investigators kept Rana's phone during the roughly 12 hours he was held at Teku,” the officer added.

Kantipur could not independently verify the officer’s allegation of political pressure.

A junior officer at the Kathmandu Valley Crime Investigation Office said the distinction between investigative necessity and political pressure can be difficult to make in practice.

“There are cases in which political leadership has an interest. We have to follow orders,” the officer said. “Otherwise, phones are not seized unnecessarily in cases where there is no political interest.”

Former CIB chief Uttam Raj Subedi said that phones have become one of the most useful sources of investigative leads, but that does not mean every phone is relevant to every investigation.

“Everyone keeps a lot of things on their mobile,” Subedi said. “From finding out what kind of people they are communicating with to knowing about their daily activities, it is an easy way to find out about them.”

But there are cases in which a phone may have little or no relevance to the alleged offence.

“It is not appropriate to seize phones indiscriminately,” he said.

Former CIB chief Hemant Malla Thakuri said there can be legitimate grounds for taking the phone of someone facing criminal proceedings.

But Rana’s case was different, he said.

“It seems they wanted to know who he had been in contact with and what conversations he had had,” Malla said. “This is a serious matter.”

The distinction is important because police do not acquire only a physical object when they take a phone. They may acquire access to a person's private life — and to information belonging to people who have never been subjects of an investigation.

The central issue, then, is not whether phones are useful to investigators. It is whether police can turn that usefulness to justify taking a person's phone — and, once they have it, accessing the private life contained inside it.

Police have offered broad explanations for why phones can be useful to investigations. What remains unclear is more basic: what offence justifies taking each device, what legal authority allows police to examine it, and what safeguards apply to the information they obtain.

In Rana’s case, police have not said whether the phone was unlocked or examined, whether information was extracted from it, whether it was sent for forensic examination or what legal authority, if any, was relied upon to access its contents.

They have said only that they took it.

For Malla, that is the problem in its simplest form.

“Police themselves say there was no offence, that they took him [Rana] for security,” said Malla. “In that situation, how can they seize his means of communication?”

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