Clause 4.—(APPLICATION FOR LEAVE TO APPEAL.) (Hansard, 30 April 1951)

§ The Lord Advocate

I beg to move, in page 4, to leave out lines 9 and 10, and insert: 930 lodged, within the prescribed period, either with the registrar or, in any such circumstances as may be prescribed, with the prescribed person for forwarding to the registrar. The purpose of this Amendment is to allow applications made on behalf of an appellant to be lodged either with the registrar or some other person prescribed in the rules of court whose duty it will be to forward the application to the registrar. This Amendment is to ensure that the appellant can make application within the prescribed time in all cases. If abroad, the only method of communication available to him might be the Service method, and, in such circumstances, it would not be right to stipulate that notice should reach the registrar in London within the prescribed time. Accordingly, by virtue of this Amendment, we cater for that set of circumstances.

§ Mr. Manningham-Buller

This is an improvement to the Bill, and, as such, we welcome it, but I should like to ask the Lord Advocate to give consideration to the possibility of providing that where, for instance, an accused man is advised by lawyers overseas that there is a great point of law involved in this case, where he lodges a petition, it should be open to him, and machinery should be provided at the same time to enable him to send with his petition his notice of appeal in the terms that, if his petition was rejected, he wished to appeal. Under the Bill at present, that cannot be done, or, at any rate, if he does that, the application for leave to appeal will be completely ineffective.

It seems to me to be rather unnecessary machinery to provide that in special cases there must be communication, which means a petition to the registrar, before any application for leave to appeal can be granted I should have thought that it would have been an improvement to this Measure if it was open to the accused person to send forward both his petition and his application for leave to appeal, in the event of the petition being rejected. That is how it seems to me, and I would merely ask the right hon. and learned Gentleman to give some thought to my proposal.