-
-
The activities of the Commonwealth Secretariat in the legal field, as established and guided by Meetings of Commonwealth Law Ministers over the years, have developed into a substantial, day-to-day workload for the Legal Division. The Commonwealth Law Bulletin represents the most significant investment of our resources. Requests for assistance and for information are received daily, most often by telex and these are dealt with as swiftly as the means at our disposal permit.
-
In many areas of law, relevant both to private individuals and to commercial enterprises, there is a gradual diversification of legal rules within the Commonwealth. This is a natural result of the activity of different Member countries in progressively adapting their inherited common legal tradition to meet changing local circumstances. One result is that lawyers dealing with matters affecting two or more Commonwealth jurisdictions have greater needs in terms of legal information; another is that there is a growing importance for private international law (or the conflict of laws) in intra-Commonwealth legal affairs.
-
The challenges faced by small States in meeting the demands of independence and of modern government have always been a prime concern of the Commonwealth Secretariat. Perhaps as in no other area, these are felt in legal affairs, for the legal officers of the small State are called upon to handle the same range of multifarious tasks as are their colleagues in larger establishments. The differences are quantitative, not qualitative, and in the absence of quantity, problems in gaining experience arise.
-
-
Over the past ten years the Commonwealth Secretariat and the Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee (AALCC) have co-operated in a number of areas. In order to appraise Ministers who are not familiar with the work of the AALCC the Secretariat invited the Committee's Secretary-General to prepare the accompanying paper.
-
-
To complement the views of Professor John LI. J. Edwards contained in LMM(83)5, a distinguished academic and well-known writer on the role of Law Officers, the Commonwealth Secretariat invited Mr Austin Amissah, a former Attorney-General, Director of Public Prosecutions and Justice of Appeal of Ghana, to write on the slightly broader topic, “The decision to prosecute”.
-
-
The United Kingdom contains three different prosecution systems but two of these, those in England and Wales and Northern Ireland, have strong similarities. The first part of this memorandum is concerned with the position in England and Wales and the second part with that in Scotland. In Northern Ireland all prosecutions are under the control of the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland.
-
The vexed problem of selecting, training and retaining competent legal draftsmen has been a recurring topic on the Agenda of Law Ministers and is one which, more than any other single topic, has dominated the activities of the Legal Division since its inception as well as those of the Commonwealth Fund for Technical Co-operation.
-
The Legislative Drafting course was started in the University year 1979-80 at the instigation of the then Dean of the Faculty of Law, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, (now Mr. Justice Telford Georges of Zimbabwe). The course was to be part of a Master of Laws degree and had been some time in the planning. It was to be sponsored by three Caribbean Commonwealth countries in co-operation with the University.
-
The annexed discussion paper, “Extrinsic Aids to Statutory Interpretation”, was tabled in the Australian Parliament on 14 October 1982. It was tabled with the intention that the paper be studied and debated inside and outside the Parliament before any of its proposals are put forward as legislation.
-
In Sri Lanka there are two types of explanatory memoranda (a) Statements of objects and reasons appended to Bills and (b) Statements of legal effect appended to amending Bills. The former are prepared by the Ministry sponsoring the Bill and the latter, by the Legal Draftsman's Department. There is no strict practice in regard to statements of objects and reasons.
-
-
The legal profession in Australia will soon have access to computer systems for legal information retrieval to assist them in their legal research. The State Governments of Victoria and New South Wales are at an advanced stage in making arrangements with private sector organisations to establish and operate legal information retrieval systems to include at least the statutes, subordinate legislation and case law of those particular States. The plan is for each of the two systems also to include the primary legal materials of at least two other States and, in this way, the two systems will cover the six States of Australia.
-
New information technology: One of today's most dynamic technologies is the new information technology. This generic expression refers to the development of a whole range of electronic and mechanical devices which generate, process, store and communicate information. They do so in ever increasing quantities, at ever increasing speed and consistently diminishing cost.
-
-
-
-
Although New Zealand had long had on its books a provision (now s.403 of the Crimes Act 1961) giving the Courts the power to award compensation to any person who suffers loss by reason of any criminal offence, this relatively narrow provision could not readily be adopted to stripping offenders of their ill-gotten gains.
-
In recent years the concern of governments to protect their national heritage has produced legislation designed to restrict or forbid the export of objects of national cultural significance. A 1980 survey by Lyndel V. Prott and Patrick J. O'Keefe of 124 jurisdictions showed that 106 had some legislative control over export. The penalties for illegal export, they found, ranged from fines to forfeiture of the objects concerned.
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
In the past several years the police in many Commonwealth jurisdictions have been very much in the public eye. While civil liberties groups have voiced disquiet about the manner in which complaints against the police are handled, others have been pressing for increased police powers to stem the rise in crime.
-
In August 1982, the Minister of Justice of Canada publicly released a major statement of government policy with respect to Canadian criminal law. This statement, entitled The Criminal Law in Canadian Society, is unique in Canadian experience in setting out an explicit statement of principles on the basis of which criminal law policy is to be pursued in the coming years.
-
-
-
-
As noted at page 16 of Professor David McClean's paper on “Reform of the Law of Domicile” (LMM(83)11), Barbados has substantially adopted the New Zealand Domicile Act, 1976. But paradoxically the Barbados legislation came into operation a full year ahead that of New Zealand: 1 January 1980 as opposed to 1 January 1981.
-
From time to time the attention of the Commonwealth Secretariat has been drawn to a lack of appropriate legal archives in some Commonwealth jurisdictions. On occasion, this has been done by practitioners, unable to locate material needed for the preparation of, e.g. a constitutional case. At other times this has been done by academic researchers.
-
-
-
The need for systematic law reform has been felt by many Governments in the Commonwealth, no less than ourselves in Zambia. Those older Members of the Commonwealth, who have had the resources, have long established permanent law reform agencies devoted to the work of reviewing and updating the laws to conform with contemporary needs and to be an effective instrument in the development of the country. These law reform agencies have done commendable work from which we have been drawing useful lessons for those of us who have somewhat made a belated beginning in the task of systematic law reform.
-
-
-
Community legal education programmes are in existence throughout Canada, providing information to the public about substantive law, the legal process and justice system, and justice issues. The last ten years have seen significant growth in this field with one or more programmes operating in every Province in Canada. The Canadian Law information Council (CLIC) has established a national clearing-house of information on the subject (CLIC is an independent organisation created to improve the quality of legal material available to the profession and the public).