Domestic Court Changes

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31923, 26 February 1969, Page 30

Domestic Court Changes

(From Our Own Reporter) WELLINGTON, Feb. 25. An overhaul of Court administration, practice, and procedure would be undertaken to make domestic proceedings virtually a new division of Court work, the Minister of Justice (Mr Hanan) said today. Domestic proceedings, he said, were criminal in neither form nor substance. A special sub-committee of the Magistrate’s Courts Rules Committee was being set up to devise new rules to govern court procedure for domestic proceedings, and new court forms to give substance to them. The sub-committee, to be headed by Mr J. A. Wicks, S.M., of Wellington, will include specialist co-opted members, among them representatives of the Justice Department and of the Law Society New Records “At present,” said Mr Hanan, “domestic proceedings are grouped with criminal proceedings both statistically and in court records. This state of affairs must also end. “What is needed is a system based on a triple division of court work—civil, criminal and domestic—with separate record books for each. “While petty criminal cases are reported and analysed in considerable detail in the Justice Department statistics,

it is impossible to get any useful information from those statistics about domestic cases.

“To'formulate any sort of rational policy dealing with family law, it is essential that we have data and not opinion for a basis. This work must clearly be upgraded,” Mr Hanan said.

Ways in which domestic proceedings would be) dealt

with by courts would be defined in regulations being prepared under the Domestic Proceedings Act, 1968, which would not come into effect until January 1, 1970. The need to draft regulations to secure a separate system of records and statistics and other changes, said Mr Hanan, was one reason for the delay in bringing the legislation into force.