Justice Sector and the Rule of Law - AfriMAP

of the deceased spouse. 230 They attributed their lack of certainty about amendments to the lawto the irregularity of law revision by the Ministry of Justice, and the failure of law firms and thejudiciary to acquire copies of amendments in a regular and timely manner in sufficient numbersto enable access by all staff.Case law is not easily available to justice system staff. In 2002, the IBA observed that ‘judgesdo not have access to comprehensive Malawian jurisprudence, and as such the developmentof Malawi’s own constitutional and common law principles is compromised.’ 231 This situationremains unchanged.Reports of judgments of the High Court and Supreme Court of Appeal are published bythe judiciary in the Malawi Law Reports Series (formerly called the Africa Law Reports MalawiSeries). The published reports are out of date: decisions made as long ago as 1994 have notyet been published. The law reports are relatively expensive and the offices of most staff in thejustice sector do not have them. In the absence of up-to-date comprehensive law reporting, textsof court judgments are available to the public as ‘unreported cases’. Every person is entitled tosubscribe to receive copies of all judgments of the High Court and Supreme Court of Appeal.In practice, inefficiencies in judgment delivery and post-delivery processing mean that even‘unpublished’ judgments tend to be relatively out of date by the time a member of the public canaccess them. 232 Transcripts of judgments in the High Court and Supreme Court of Appeal aresupplied to the participants in the case at a reasonable cost. However, there are significant delaysin the preparation and supply of the transcripts. The problem also affects the processing of caserecords of magistrate court proceedings in preparation for appeals to the High Court. In the caseof Chirambo and Chirwa v The Republic, 233 the High Court observed that: ‘There are difficultiesin processing appeals these days...The rules require the lower court to send to this Court a typedrecord of the lower court proceedings. Many times there is inadequate stationery. Most courtsuse typewriters. They have to redo the typescript every time there is a mistake.’ 234 As it happened,in the Chirambo case, by the time the record of the proceedings in the magistrates’ court wasready for the High Court appeal and that court quashed their original conviction, the appellantshad already served their six-month sentence of imprisonment.Expert commentary on the law is not easily available to justice staff and to others. There are veryfew textbooks that comment specifically on the application of Malawian law. Such commentaryis found mainly in journal articles and other formats; though there is only one law journal