Other Courts
1. Other courts are divided into:
The Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.
2. Its jurisdiction is now confined to hearing appeals from the remaining
colonies, and from those former British territories which have chosen to
retain it as their final appeal court.
3. The judges of the Privy Council are predominantly the same Law Lords
that normally sit in the House of Lords, with the addition, every now and
again, of eminent judges from Commonwealth countries,
The Employment Appeal Tribunal
4. It was set up following the great increase in recent years of disputes
arising from employment, especially involving unfair dismissal or
discrimination.
5. The court hears appeals from industrial tribunals.
6. Every case is heard by a High Court judge and two lay members chosen for
their knowledge and experience of industrial relations: trade union
officials, for instance, and representatives of employers' organizations.
The Restrictive Practices Court
7. Which is of the level of the High Court, has various powers to stop or
control restrictive or monopolistic practices in the supply of goods and
services - for example, agreements between ostensibly competitive
companies to charge a minimum price for their products, against the
interests of the consumer.
Coroners' Courts.
8. Coroners, who must be qualified lawyers or doctors, have a duty to hold
public inquests into any violent, unnatural or suspicious death, or in
the case of a person dying suddenly without any obvious cause, or in
prison or in police custody.
9. Coroners' inquests are not trials, but witnesses are called, and there
is often a jury who decide on the manner of death - suicide, unlawful
killing, misadventure or accident - or (where they are not sure) return
an open verdict.
Tribunals.
10. Outside the normal hierarchy of the courts, flourishes a parallel
structure of administrative and judicial bodies lumped together under the
genera! description of tribunals.
11. Some of them have been in existence for a century or more, but they
have proliferated especially in the last thirty years, since the creation
of the welfare state.
12. Some of the most important and widely used are the industrial
tribunals, where workers can claim compensation for unfair dismissal; the
supplementary benefit appeals tribunal; rent tribunal; and the
immigration appeals tribunal.
Two Foreign Courts
13. Two courts outside Britain's boundaries have recently come to play a
big part in her affairs.
14. The two deal with completely different issues, and belong to different
regional institutions,
The European Court
15. (more properly, the Court of Justice of the European Community, called
the European Union - EU - since 1993) sits in Luxembourg.
16. It is the court of the EU, and therefore Britain, as its member, is
under its jurisdiction on matters affecting the EU.
The European Court of Human Rights
17. It sits in Strasbourg (France) and operates under the umbrella of the
Council of Europe.
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