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In re Gunawardena, Harbutt and Banks: CACD 1990

The defendant applied to stay the proceedings on the grounds that they were an abuse of process.
Held: The application for leave to appeal was rejected. The application to stay was not within the ambit of the preparatory hearing and therefore was not within section 7(1), which was a necessary precondition to this Court having jurisdiction under section 9.
Watkins LJ said: ‘In our judgment the words of section 7, 8 and 9 themselves plainly demonstrate the object of Parliament in creating the preparatory hearing. It must have been, according to the language used, we think, the intention of Parliament, in introducing this novel procedure — novel in that it has not been introduced in respect of any other kind of criminal trial — to ensure that it be used for a specific purpose or purposes. It deliberately so enacted, in our view, the provisions of subsection (1) of section 7 in order to make it clear that it was creating this new and very valuable procedure for the specified purposes and no other.
We cannot bring ourselves to believe that Parliament can possibly, by using the clear words which it has used in sections 7 and 9, have intended to allow a preparatory hearing to commence for a certain specified purpose and then permit, once a preparatory hearing for that purpose is in being, argument to range around all manner of issues which cannot be said to relate to any of the specified purposes.’ and ‘Care must be taken to avoid confusion between a preparatory hearing under the Act and the informal pre-trial review.’
References: [1990] 1 WLR 703
Judges: Watkins LJ
Statutes: Criminal Justice Act 1987 7 8 9
Jurisdiction: England and Wales
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Last Update: 27 November 2020; Ref: scu.193471 br>

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