Potential Further Issues

POTENTIAL FURTHER ISSUES

8.0 INTRODUCTION

147 It is well established that, given the jurisdiction to grant relief on judicial review is discretionary, the Court will customarily refuse to grant relief, even though it finds that the grounds for attacking the decision impugned are well founded, if it also decides that the end result of the decision was never the less justified on other well founded grounds, and even though those other grounds may not have been mentioned by the decision maker themselves, or that the decision would nevertheless have stood, had the decision making process been carried out without error, on the basis that, in such circumstances, the Claimant has not been actually prejudiced thereby.

148 Accordingly, it is incumbent upon me as a Claimant, to challenge the decision in question, not only upon the basis given by the Defendants for making it, but furthermore to address also any additional bases upon which they might arguably have properly made it as well.

149 However, it is equally well established that the Court will not entertain argument based on a hypothetical set of circumstances, or regarding hypothetical grounds, not actually reasonably disclosed by the evidence. It is not known to what extent the Court appreciates how much this leaves the Claimant squashed between a rock and hard place. In the end it appears to this Claimant that, all that I can reasonably be expected to do, in order to seek a fair adjudication of my claim, is to acknowledge the existence of certain further obvious, or perhaps not so obvious, grounds, which the Defendant decision-maker could arguably have chosen to base his decision upon, and offer to the Court the opportunity to hear my arguments, if it so chooses, as to why those further grounds would also not have supported a lawful decision making process either.

150 Thereafter, I respectfully submit, that before introducing such further grounds for the first time in judgement and relying upon them in its decision to refuse relief (or leave as the case may be), in the interests of justice, the onus rests upon the Court in the first instance to offer the Claimant a reasonable opportunity to address argument to it about those further grounds, before resting its decision to refuse relief (or leave) upon them.

151 Accordingly, I now offer in argument a list of six further broad grounds or issues, upon which the Defendants could conceivably have chosen to rely in deciding as they did, although in point of fact they didn’t, though I presently give only the briefest outline of how I would address those issues, were the Court to indicate in future that it considered it required to hear argument upon them for the reasons set out above. In several instances such outlines are additionally supported by a fuller exposition of this Claimant’s view on the law on the subject, attached hereto, in separate sheets entitled “Further Exposition”.

152 However, all of this is without prejudice to the opportunity, ex debito justitae, to offer detailed argument in future, if required, either on these further grounds or indeed, for that matter, as regards still further grounds I haven’t yet thought of, but which the Court might choose to raise instead !

Back to top