Abstract
The court record is everything to the judicial process. Budgetary constraints and administrative challenges facing judicial services in the African countries studied here leave courts with inefficient modes of generating and maintaining full and reliable court records, hence defeating the ends of justice. Evidence is lost in the process of recording and during the preservation of court records through fires and malpractices. The court record is the basis for a fair trial. Any determination of a court is founded on the material in the record and such decision is placed and preserved on the face of the record. Fair trial guarantees of appeal and review are initiated by the court record. An appeal is a trial of the record. The competence of a court that cannot accurately record its proceedings and preserve the records to guarantee a fair trial is questionable. There is a need to facilitate a reliable mode of producing and maintaining the court record, towards a culture of fulfilling the right to a fair trial in Africa. This analysis focuses mainly on the experiences of the courts of Botswana and Uganda.
Highlights
The court record is everything to the judicial process
The capacity of the courts of several African countries, such as Kenya,[1] Nigeria,[2] South Africa[3] and Zambia,[4] to foster a reliable system of taking and maintaining the court record is constrained by budgetary compromises and resource constraints that adversely affect the realisation of the right to a fair hearing
All registry staff of the Lobatse High Court in Botswana that participated in a study on the management of legal records at the court in 2007 revealed that they had lost and misplaced files, and they could not tell the number of files they lost in a year.[76]
Summary
The court record is everything to the judicial process. Evidence is lost in the process of recording and during the preservation of court records through fires and malpractices. Fair trial guarantees of appeal and review are initiated by the court record. The competence of a court that cannot accurately record its proceedings and preserve the records to guarantee a fair trial is questionable. There is a need to facilitate a reliable mode of producing and maintaining the court record, towards a culture of fulfilling the right to a fair trial in Africa. This analysis focuses mainly on the experiences of the courts of Botswana and Uganda
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