12 Annual Report
thereby abolishing the partial defence of provocation in New Zealand.
We believe that it will be preferable for provocation to be dealt with by
judges solely as a sentencing issue.
Our report entitled the Disclosure to Court of Defendantsf Previous
Convictions, Similar Offending and Bad Behaviour
an important paper dealing with difficult and demanding issues in the
law of evidence. The Commission engaged a retired High Court Judge,
the Honourable RA McGechan QC, to lead this project. The report
concluded that, given the recency of the Evidence Act 2006, it was too
early to determine whether there were any problems with its application
that required amendment. However, our investigation into this area of
the law did indicate some disturbing features of the adversarial trial
process as it applies to sexual offences. We therefore recommended that
the government should undertake an inquiry into whether the
adversarial trial process should be modified or replaced by an alternative
model, either for sex offences or some other wider class of off
A New Inquiries Act
included the Commissionfs policy recommendations and draft legislation
for a new public inquiries framework. Habeas Corpus
published in February 2008. The recommendations focussed a few
practical problems that have emerged in the current procedure.
C Implementation of Law Commission reports
In addition to this programme of work we continued to make progress
on the implementation of recommendations from a number of old
Commission reports. This work, which is now provided for in the new
processes adopted by Cabinet to manage the Government response to
Law Commission reports, has included reviewing the recommendations
of old reports and updating them where required, preparation of cabinet
papers, drafting instructions for legislation and liaison with Parliamentary
Counsel Office (PCO), and further work on implementation with the
administering Department. Legislative work on the following reports was
progressed through the year:
Limitation Defences in Civil Cases
1988 (NZLC R6) and Tidying the
Limitation Act
(NZLC R61);
Aspects of Damages:the Award of Interest on Money Claims
(NZLC R28);
Waka Umanga
: A Proposed Law for Maori Governance Entities
(NZLC R92);
Access to Court Records
(NZLC R93);
The Partial Defence of Provocation
(NZLC R97)
