Law Commission Consultation on Criminal Appeals (full paper)

Overview

As a law reform body we are unable to provide legal advice on individual cases.

This is a public consultation by the Law Commission of England and Wales on Criminal Appeals (https://lawcom.gov.uk/project/criminal-appeals/). We are consulting on reform to the law relating to appeals in criminal cases, with a view to ensuring that courts have powers that enable the effective, efficient and appropriate resolution of appeals. Our terms of reference are available here.

The consultation has two sets of questions: from this 108-consultation-question full consultation paper form; and from the 29-summary-consultation-question summary consultation paper form. Responses to both forms will be considered equally.

We recommend that consultees read the full consultation paper before responding to this consultation. If they cannot or do not wish to, they can read the summary consultation paper and respond to it here.

Consultees do not need to answer all the questions if they are only interested in some aspects of the consultation.

(Please email criminal.appeals@lawcommission.gov.uk to request a paper response form to the summary paper.)

About the Law Commission: The Law Commission is a statutory body, created by the Law Commissions Act 1965 for the purpose of promoting the reform of the law. It is an advisory Non Departmental Public Body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). The Law Commission is independent of Government. See more information about the Law Commission at https://lawcom.gov.uk/.

Responses to this consultation: We aim to be transparent in our decision-making. We may publish or disclose information you provide in response to Law Commission papers, including personal information. For example, we may publish an extract of your response in Law Commission publications, or publish the response itself. We may also sahre responses with Government. Additionally, we may be required to disclose the information, such as in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. We will process your personal data in accordance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation.

Consultation responses are most effective we are able to report which consultees responded to us, and what they said. If you consider that it is necessary for all or some of the information that you provide to be treated as confidential and so neither published nor disclosed, please contact us before sending it. Please limit the confidential material to a minimum, clearly identify it and explain why you want it to be confidential. We cannot guarantee that confidentiality can be maintained in all circumstances and an automatic disclaimer generated by your IT system will not be regarded as binding on the Law Commission.

Alternatively, you may want your response to be anonymous. That means that we may refer to what you say in your response, but will not reveal that the information came from you. You might want your response to be anonymous because it contains sensitive information about you or your family, or because you are worried about other people knowing what you have said to us.

We list who responded to our consultations in our reports. If you provide a confidential response your name will appear in that list. If your response is anonymous we will not include your name in the list unless you have given us permission to do so.

For information about how we handle your personal data, please see our privacy notice at https://lawcom.gov.uk/document/privacy-notice-and-handling-data/.

Any queries can be directed to enquiries@lawcommission.gov.uk.

Once you have completed your consultation response, we would be grateful if you could complete a short, anonymous survey to help us understand the characteristics of individuals and organisations who have responded. Your answers will be held and analysed separately to your consultation response. The link is available here.