If a missing person has not contacted their family for at least 7 years and their whereabouts are unknown, legal procedures must be followed to obtain a civil court judgment declaring them dead.
A family member going missing without any information is not merely a tragedy; beyond that, it is also a painful incident involving many practical and legal complications,
If a family member goes missing, several legal complications arise, such as settling property matters linked to them, handling bank accounts, ensuring that the salary or pension they had been receiving is obtained by the family members who depend on them, and transferring property rights.
If a person dies, the legal relief available to that family is not available when they go missing. This is because it cannot be proven where the missing person is, nor can it be immediately proven that they have died. At the same time, for administrative matters such as property and bank accounts, they cannot be treated as alive, creating a difficult situation.
It is precisely at times like these that the procedures under civil law help in legally declaring a person dead.
Under the Indian Constitution, the family can obtain a remedy for this issue through presumptions based on evidence and court rulings.
The legal document obtained from the court declaring a person dead is what helps put an end to many hardships. In most cases, when approaching government departments, these court documents are the valid ones.
Relief can be obtained under Section 108 of the Indian Constitution. That is, the primary law for dealing with matters related to missing persons is Section 108 of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872.
This section establishes the legal doctrine known as the presumption of death, rebuttable by evidence. Instead of declaring a person dead simply because they have ordinarily been missing, this law shifts the “burden of proof.”
Under the law, a question may arise as to whether a person is alive or dead. At that time, if it is proved by the family members who are required to provide information about him that no information about him has been known for the past seven years, the burden of proving that he is alive shifts to the party claiming that he is alive.
Under this law, if a person is to be declared dead, it must be proved that he has had no contact with his family for at least seven years.
That is, if a person has gone missing, this certificate is obtained from those who would naturally be likely to have been informed by them, namely close family members, friends, or members of the community.
Therefore, once it is proven that a person has remained without contact with family or anyone else for seven years, and if he is said to be alive, the burden of proving that shifts to the opposing party. However, if no one, from either side, provides the relevant evidence, the court presumes that he has died and, since the date of death is unknown and no other evidence can be gathered, and because there must be a common date for all those filing such cases, the court generally issues an order treating the date of filing the case as the date of death.