The Supreme Court on Monday held that secretly recorded telephonic conversations of a spouse can be admitted as evidence in divorce proceedings, Live Law reported.

A bench of Justices BV Nagarathna and Satish Chandra Sharma set aside a Punjab and Haryana High Court judgement, which had accepted a woman’s plea that a conversation her husband recorded without her knowledge could not be used in their divorce case.

The High Court had called the husband’s act a “clear breach” of the woman’s right to privacy.

On Monday, the Supreme Court observed that if a marriage has reached a state where spouses are “actively snooping” or each other, it is a “symptom of a broken relationship and denotes a lack of trust between them”.

“We do not think such an argument [against admissibility] is tenable,” the court said.

The bench also rejected the argument that permitting such evidence would encourage snooping between spouses, according to Live Law.

A family court in Bathinda had earlier allowed the husband to submit recorded phone conversations with his wife to support allegations of cruelty.

The wife had challenged this in the High Court, arguing that the recordings were made without her consent and violated her fundamental right to privacy.