APPEAL Court President Marva McDonald Bishop says there will be a full court sitting soon to hammer out issues with aspects of the new Firearms Act which have been proving a pain to lawyers and judges alike.

The Firearms (Prohibition, Restriction and Regulation) Act, which took effect in November 2022, among other things, provides penalties ranging from 15 years to life imprisonment for possession of illegal weapons, establishes a dual regime, distinguishing between prohibited weapons or unregulated firearms and connected activities, and firearms that are duly authorised or registered.

It also speaks to establishing a framework that prohibits firearms and ammunition that are illicitly traded, and which regards possession of those prohibited firearms and ammunition as the foundation on which other violent crimes are committed.

But McDonald Bishop, in presiding over a special sitting of the Appeal Court marking the opening of the Michaelmas Term on Monday — her first since being appointed — said the Act has proven to be problematic and was one of those singled out during a recent retreat for the profession.

“There are issues pertaining to certain legislation and we can highlight the Firearms Act. The Firearms Act is giving problems to prosecutors, it’s giving problems to trial judges, and surely at the Court of Appeal. We might have seen other cases where the court might seem inconsistent in its approach and we have taken the decision that we have to take steps to put the court in a position where we can declare conclusively what the position of the court is on a particular area of the law so to avoid confusion,” Justice McDonald Bishop told the sitting.

“That is how we propose to deal with difficult areas; we empanel a court of no less than perhaps seven, given that it’s a court of 13 persons,” she said.

In the meantime, the Appeal Court president said it is by no means sitting on its laurels where the rate of its judgment delivery is concerned.

“That is a sore point, for us at the court [and] external stakeholders. Somehow, we have not been able to get that magic to have no reserved judgment on a list. Even the best of the best came to the Court of Appeal and retired and they did not manage to bell that cat. It has run away from us no matter how hard we tried,” stated McDonald-Bishop.

“The statistics will show that, in terms of our judgment delivery, we are way above the international standards. The international standards are 100 per cent and we are measured to be over 300 and odd per cent in 2023 and 449 per cent in 2022. But you are not feeling it because you are awaiting your judgments and you are waiting for a while,” McDonald Bishop said.

“So I am not comforted by the statistics, despite the fact that we seem to be doing well in that area. We had our judicial retreat last week and that is an area we have highlighted and isolated for focus during this term,” she added.

McDonald Bishop said the court is aiming to have five cases done per judge for this term, since there are 13 judges in order to address the issue of backlog.

“So, please bear with us. While our judgment delivery standard is above international standards, we are still not comfortable and we will be working assiduously to reduce the backlog of reserved judgments,” she said, while noting that at times targets have been set off course because judges have had to set aside judgments they are working on to deal with others that have “hijacked the system”.