The Chief Justice of the Gambia, Hassan B. Jallow has given a directive for all superior courts to go on summer vacation until end September 2020. The superior courts in The Gambia are the High Court, the Gambia Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court while other courts are regarded as subordinate courts. The Chief Justice relied on Section 143 subsection 1 of the 1997 Constitution to make such directives amid the surge in the number of cases of the novel coronavirus. This is the fifth directive by the Chief Justice in 2020. Chief Justice Jallow said the current situation poses a greater danger to the health and safety of people, thus the need for measures to be taken to avoid the spread of the virus. The Gambia currently has about a thousand confirmed cases of the coronavirus which has been declared as a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. The Gambia Government on the 5 th August 2020 has declared another state of public emergency which indicated the country
The draft amendment Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) seeks, among others, to stiffen private criminal prosecution. The private prosecutor will be left with little or no rights if the draft bill becomes law. The draft CPC amendment bill will undermine people’s right to initiate and continue with private criminal prosecution if it is allowed to pass to become law. What sense does it make for a Director of Public Prosecutions to be given the power to discontinue a private criminal prosecution? The differences between the current CPC and the draft amendment of the CPC The current Criminal Procedure Code thus provides that a person, other than a public prosecutor or a police officer, who has reasonable and probable cause to believe that an offence has been committed by a person, may make a complaint thereof to a Magistrate who has jurisdiction to try or inquire into the alleged offence, or within the local limits of whose jurisdiction the accused person is alleged to reside or be. The complai
