A warrant for a face
On August 12, 2026, reports emerged that the Osaka Prefectural Police had used a court-issued physical examination warrant to compel facial-recognition unlocking of smartphones seized during a raid on Natural, an illegal employment-brokering ring. The warrant instructed officers to first ask a suspect to unlock voluntarily; if refused, they were authorised to hold the suspect's face 20 to 50 centimetres from the device for about a second to trigger the phone's facial-authentication sensor. Police justified the urgency by noting the group's app could remotely wipe exchanged data the moment investigators lost custody of a live session (IDTechWire).
It is, by most accounts, the first known use of Japan's physical examination warrant — historically reserved for documenting injuries or needle marks — to compel biometric device access. Hitotsubashi University law professor Daisuke Midori's response was measured rather than alarmed: the warrant "is not necessarily improper," he said, while cautioning that its execution could exceed socially accepted limits on force (IDTechWire). That distinction — between compelling someone to recall and disclose something in their mind versus compelling them to present a physical characteristic — is exactly the fault line running through India's own unresolved fight over phone unlocking.
The steelman for compulsion
Before dismissing forced-unlock powers as overreach, the case for them deserves a fair hearing. Digital evidence is uniquely perishable: remote-wipe features, auto-lock timers, and encrypted backups mean that a delay of hours between seizure and access can permanently destroy evidence of real crimes — here, an employment-fraud operation exploiting vulnerable workers. Courts have long allowed police to take fingerprints, blood samples, and handwriting exemplars without treating this as self-incrimination, on the theory that producing a physical characteristic is fundamentally different from being forced to speak. A face, like a fingerprint, is already public and already exposed to any camera on the street; using it to open a phone is a narrower intrusion than, say, extracting a memorised password. Judicial pre-authorisation — a warrant granted for a specific device, in a specific investigation — is precisely the kind of proportionate, case-by-case check that keeps this from sliding into general surveillance.
India already skipped the warrant step
What makes Osaka instructive for India is not that the tactic is exotic — it's that India's Parliament has already gone further than Japan's courts, without requiring anything like a per-instance warrant. The Criminal Procedure (Identification) Act, 2022 empowers a police officer to collect "finger-prints, palm-print impressions, footprint impressions, photographs, iris and retina scan" and other biometric measurements from any arrested person, retained by the National Crime Records Bureau for up to 75 years. Refusal to provide biological samples can be declined only for specific offence categories; refusing other measurements can itself be prosecuted as obstructing a public servant (PRS Legislative Research). Unlike Osaka's warrant, which named a specific target and a specific urgency, India's Act operates through standing administrative authority — no magistrate signs off on each iris scan.
Meanwhile, the narrower question Osaka's case raises — can police compel a password or biometric unlock, specifically — remains genuinely unsettled in Indian law. In Virendra Khanna v. State of Karnataka (12 March 2021), the Karnataka High Court held that while courts cannot themselves order a suspect to hand over a passcode or biometric unmet, investigating officers may request it, treating the act as closer to producing physical evidence than to testimonial compulsion (Indian Kanoon). That sits uneasily against the Supreme Court's own precedent in Selvi v. State of Karnataka (2010) 7 SCC 263, which held that Article 20(3)'s protection against self-incrimination extends to any involuntary extraction of "personal knowledge" from a suspect's mind — not just spoken confessions. Legal commentators have flagged that a password, unlike a fingerprint, requires exactly the kind of mental recall Selvi was designed to protect, and at least one trial court (CBI v. Mahesh Kumar Sharma) has since declined to follow Virendra Khanna's reasoning.
What Osaka gets right that Delhi doesn't
The honest case for compelled biometric access rests on it being narrow, judicially supervised, and tied to demonstrable urgency — exactly what Osaka's warrant, whatever its faults, attempted to establish. India's framework inverts that structure: broad statutory authority to collect and retain biometric data for up to 75 years, triggered by arrest rather than conviction, with refusal itself criminalised, and no requirement that a magistrate weigh the specific investigative need against the specific intrusion. A pro-innovation, pro-privacy publication should welcome tools that let police preserve real evidence in real time — but only when paired with the individualised judicial check that gives the practice legitimacy. India doesn't need to copy Japan's warrant mechanics wholesale, but it does need the Supreme Court to resolve the Virendra Khanna–Selvi conflict, and Parliament to revisit a 2022 law that currently asks for none of the case-by-case scrutiny that even Japan's police thought necessary to seek.