By S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors · Published 27 October 2026 · Informational content, not legal advice: see our disclaimer
An NRI husband flies home for a family function and is stopped at immigration, not because of any criminal charge he was told about, but because a Look Out Circular was quietly opened against him months earlier over a matrimonial complaint filed while he was abroad.
Look Out Circulars, or LOCs, were designed as a narrow tool to stop someone genuinely absconding from serious crime, not a leverage device in a divorce or dowry dispute, and two 2026 High Court rulings have pushed back hard on exactly that kind of overreach.
What an LOC Actually Is and Who Can Ask for One
A Look Out Circular is an internal communication from a law enforcement or investigating agency to the Bureau of Immigration, asking immigration authorities to detain, or simply flag and inform on, a named individual attempting to cross a port of entry or exit. It has no independent statutory basis of its own; it operates through executive instructions issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs, periodically revised, most notably after the Vijay Mallya episode, which extended the power to request an LOC to heads of public sector banks in cases of large-scale financial default.
For an ordinary matrimonial or civil dispute, the request has to come from a police or investigating agency actually seized of a cognizable offence, not from the complainant directly, and, per a March 2026 revision to the governing guidelines, not from statutory bodies like the National Commission for Women or the National Human Rights Commission acting on their own. Such bodies must now route any request through a law enforcement agency rather than approach the Bureau of Immigration themselves.
The Core Rule: Grave Offences and Genuine Flight Risk
The settled position, repeated across High Court rulings for years and reinforced through 2026, is that an LOC is meant for grave offences, cases involving financial irregularities of real magnitude, or conduct genuinely threatening national security or the integrity of a trial. Recourse to it is available where an accused in a cognizable offence is deliberately evading arrest, not appearing before the trial court despite a non-bailable warrant, or is likely to leave the country specifically to evade trial or arrest, none of which describes an NRI who is simply living and working where his job happens to be.
A Section 498-A complaint by itself does not meet that bar merely because the husband happens to work overseas. Working and living abroad is not evidence of an intention to abscond, and treating every NRI respondent in a matrimonial complaint as a flight risk collapses an executive power meant for exceptional cases into a routine feature of every contested divorce, turning what should be a narrow safeguard against genuine absconders into a default tactic used to pressure a spouse into a particular settlement.
The Andhra Pradesh Ruling: Cooperation Defeats the LOC
In 2026, the Andhra Pradesh High Court quashed an LOC issued against an overseas employee facing a dowry harassment complaint under Section 498-A, holding that mechanically continuing a travel ban against someone actually cooperating with the ongoing trial violated his right to travel and personal liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution. The Court was explicit that an LOC is a measure reserved for grave offences, financial irregularities, or conduct affecting society at large, not a default consequence of a pending matrimonial criminal case that happens to name an NRI as the accused.
Police must apply that threshold before opening one, rather than treating the request as routine paperwork once a complaint is filed, and a magistrate or investigating officer who simply forwards every such request without applying their own mind risks exactly the kind of order the Andhra Pradesh High Court set aside. Cooperation with the trial, appearing when summoned and not evading process, is the single fact that most undermines any justification for keeping an LOC alive once it has already served its narrow purpose of preventing flight.
The Karnataka Position on Converting a Dispute Into a Crime
Karnataka's High Court went further in a January 2026 order, observing that issuing a Look Out Circular against a husband by effectively converting what is really a matrimonial dispute into an alleged criminal offence only compounds the injustice to both parties rather than resolving anything between them. That order quashed the criminal proceedings underlying the LOC altogether, treating the use of criminal process and an LOC together as a pressure tactic in what was, at bottom, a marital dispute better suited to maintenance and custody proceedings than to a travel ban dressed up as a criminal safeguard.
A separate October 2026 Karnataka order on a wife's own application for an LOC against a husband working in France shows the other side of the same coin: courts are scrutinising applications from either spouse with real care rather than issuing them as a matter of course, and a magistrate's initial rejection of such an application, later taken up in a criminal petition before the High Court, is not unusual or treated as itself a mistake simply because a party wanted a different outcome.
Can the National Commission for Women Get One Issued Directly?
Whether a statutory body like the National Commission for Women can itself direct the Bureau of Immigration to issue an LOC, bypassing the ordinary requirement that a police agency seized of a cognizable case make the request, has a long and largely unfavourable history for the Commission, going back to a Delhi High Court ruling that the NCW cannot exercise what amounts to a civil court's coercive power in this way merely because it has a statutory mandate to look into NRI matrimonial complaints.
The March 2026 revision to the MHA's LOC guidelines appears to have settled this more formally for the present, excluding statutory bodies such as the NCW and the NHRC from directly requesting an LOC and requiring any such request to be routed through a proper law enforcement agency instead, with the standard proforma now reserving an open-ended category for intelligence agencies handling counter-terrorism matters rather than for a welfare body handling a marital complaint.
How an NRI Actually Gets an LOC Lifted
An NRI who discovers an LOC against them, usually at the worst possible moment, has two broad routes available. The administrative route is to approach the investigating agency or the court seized of the underlying case directly, showing cooperation with the proceedings, such as appearing when asked and having no pending non-bailable warrant outstanding, and asking that agency to request withdrawal of the LOC itself, since only the requesting agency or a competent court can formally recall it once issued.
The judicial route, where the investigating agency is uncooperative or the underlying case does not meet the grave-offence threshold described above, is a writ petition before the jurisdictional High Court seeking quashing of the LOC on the Article 21 ground the Andhra Pradesh ruling applied, supported by evidence of the person's actual conduct in the proceedings rather than mere assertions of innocence made for the first time in the petition itself.
Practical Steps Before You Travel
An NRI facing a matrimonial complaint at home should not assume an LOC exists only once stopped at the airport; checking proactively, through counsel, whether any such circular has been opened avoids the far worse experience of finding out at immigration with family in tow and a flight about to leave. Settling or resolving the underlying case does not automatically make an LOC disappear, since it has to be affirmatively recalled by whichever agency requested it in the first place.
Any settlement or quashing of the criminal case should specifically address getting the LOC withdrawn as a term of that resolution, not an afterthought assumed to follow automatically once the main dispute is over. Keeping records of actual cooperation with the investigation or trial, such as dates attended, documents furnished and any correspondence with the investigating officer, is the single most useful evidence if a challenge to the LOC ever becomes necessary later.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can my spouse get an LOC issued against me just by filing a complaint?
Not directly. The request has to come from a police agency investigating a cognizable offence, and courts have increasingly scrutinised such requests, rejecting them where the underlying case does not show genuine flight risk or a grave offence that justifies one.
Does working abroad automatically make me a flight risk for LOC purposes?
No. Courts have specifically rejected the idea that residing overseas, by itself, justifies an LOC. What matters is whether the person is actually evading arrest or avoiding trial despite being summoned, not simply where their job or residence happens to be located.
If I settle the matrimonial case, does the LOC lift automatically?
No. An LOC does not lapse on its own when the underlying case is settled or closed. It has to be affirmatively withdrawn by the agency that requested it, so make sure that specific withdrawal is written into any settlement terms rather than assumed.
Can the National Commission for Women directly get an LOC issued against me?
Current guidelines require the NCW and similar bodies to route any such request through a law enforcement agency rather than approach immigration authorities directly, and courts have previously held the NCW cannot exercise this power entirely on its own initiative.
What is the fastest way to challenge an LOC that already exists?
Approach the investigating agency or trial court first with evidence of cooperation, since withdrawal there is usually faster. If that fails, or the case does not meet the threshold for an LOC at all, a writ petition before the jurisdictional High Court is the route courts actually granted relief through in 2026.
References & Further Reading
The provisions and rulings below were relied on for this guide. The position can change with amendments and later decisions, so check the current text and the latest case law before acting on any of it.
- Ministry of Home Affairs Office Memoranda on Look Out Circulars, as revised, including the October 2018 and March 2026 revisions
- X v. Union of India, 2026 APHC 3446, Andhra Pradesh High Court (2026)
- Karnataka High Court order quashing proceedings and criticising LOC use in a matrimonial dispute, January 2026
- Mrs. K v. State of Karnataka, Crl. Petition No. 15637/2026, Karnataka High Court, 12 October 2026
- Vikram Sharma & Ors v. Union of India, Delhi High Court, on the NCW's lack of power to direct an LOC