ATTORNEY-GENERAL Solon Nikitas made a weighty contribution to the much-discussed issue of the law of evidence last Tuesday, expressing his opposition to its proposed amendment. Referring specifically to the procedural rule that bars hearsay evidence, he maintained that a witness should be entitled to give testimony at a trial only about “what he saw, heard, touched or smelt”.
The government spokesman wasted no time in announcing that the Attorney-general’s views were binding on the government, illustrating its incoherence yet again. About 40 days ago, the government told the legislature that it not only agreed with the proposed amendment to the law of evidence, but also with the acceptance by the court of hearsay evidence, as is the case in much of the rest of Europe. In fact, the Minister of Justice had suggested that hearsay evidence should be accepted not only in civil cases, as the legislature absurdly proposed, but also in criminal cases.
Nikitas’ main argument against any amendment was that the existing law of evidence had “served us for the past 100 years” and that there was no need to change it. I’m no lawyer, so I will not cite any legal arguments as the supporters of the amendment have done. They argued that all countries in the West had changed their court procedural rules, including Britain from which we borrowed our antiquated justice system that Nikitas wants to maintain, even though it results in many crimes going unpunished.
The absurdity of this system was brought home a few weeks ago by the former Attorney-general, Alecos Markides, who cited a bombing case in which the accused was acquitted because the witness who had collected a piece of the explosive device from the scene of the crime had not turned up in court.
I would rather use a common sense approach to explore the Attorney-general’s opinion on the issue, because it is the most reliable tool that can be used. How much sense does it make to argue that because a system has served us for a hundred years we must not change it? The world of 100 years ago bore no relation to the world of today. A hundred years ago there were no tape recorders, digital photographs, computers, camcorders, or air travel; and there were hardly any cars either. (Coincidentally, it was exactly 100 years ago this year that the Wright brothers flew for the first time in an engine-powered plane.)
Those who first drafted the law of evidence in the 19th century were not to know that a hundred years later we would have at our disposal a great many reliable tools for recording evidence that could greatly assist the justice system. By what logic should we adhere to procedures that were thought of and served people in a bygone era, people who had lived more than 40 years before Nikitas was even born?
By the same reasoning, the Attorney-general should throw personal computers out of his offices and force his staff to use typewriters, which served us well for a hundred years. By the same reasoning he should not travel abroad by aircraft but use a boat, a mode of transport that has served us well for thousands of years. And by the same reasoning, Nikitas should stop going to work in the shiny new limousine given to him by the state — and ask instead for a donkey, an animal which served us — with great devotion — for many centuries.
In the end, the new government’s promised “big and substantive change” is proving to be a change backwards, a return to the past. Even for the post of Attorney-general, President Papadopoulos made sure he appointed a man with backward views and ideas, just like his own. Before his election, this column warned that if Papadopoulos won he would take us back to the 1960s.
What I did not realise at the time was that he would ensure that the law, which is his speciality, would be taken back a century.
