PROHIBITION AGAINST EX POST FACTO LAWS VIS-À-VIS THE PRINCIPLE OF FAIR TRIAL

Author: Nakul Mangal, V year of B.A.LLB(Hons.) from Institute of Law, Nirma University, Ahmedabad

INTRODUCTION

The Fundamental Rights are considered as essential opportunities which each Indian native has the privilege to appreciate for an appropriate and agreeable improvement of character. These rights apply to all citizen of the country regardless of race, place of birth, religion, colour, creed or sex. They are enforceable in the court of law, subject to specific limitations. Assurance as for conviction for offences is guaranteed in morally right to personal liberty and life. As indicated by Article 20 of the Indian Constitution, nobody can be granted punishment which is more than what the rule that everyone must follow recommends around then. This lawful maxim depends on the rule that no criminal law can be made retroactive, that is, for an act to turn into an offence, the basic condition is that it ought to have been an offence legitimately at the hour of carrying it out. Truly, "an ex post facto Law" is essentially a law that is retroactive; that is, a law made after the accomplishing of the thing to which it relates and retroacting upon it.

Such laws are commonly regarded uncalled for, because, in the idea of the case, the individual, or people, engaged with the conduct to which such a law relates, can have had no notice, when the conduct occurred, of such an after-made law which applies to it. The injustice changes, nonetheless, from case to case. It is non-existent in instances of the accomplishing of heinous things in dependence on lawful details; in different cases, supervening unexpected occasions may offer ascent to values which wipe any injustice out; and the public welfare now and again requests that enactment be passed, which, in some measure, ignores people's severe antecedent rights.

POSITION OF THE MAXIM IN INDIA

An autonomous legislature can authorize perspective as well as retroactive legislation, as is given in Article 245 of the Indian Constitution, yet Article 20 of the Indian Constitution sets two impediments upon the law-making intensity of each law-making body expert in India as respect to retroactive criminal enactment. Article 20(1) of the Indian Constitution does not stand as a barrier in the trial of a person charged by a system other than that which existed when the offence was perpetrated, given the change in the method is not of such a nature as to establish another offence or punishment more prominent than that which could be dispensed when the offence had been committed. The preclusion is just against prescribing a legal penalty with retroactive impact. It does not disallow the requirement of some other assent by revenue or civil authority, e.g. the misfortune or hardship of any business or relinquishment of property or dropping of naturalization certificate because of act submitted preceding the operation of the correctional law being referred to or the inconvenience of some statutory punishment, to implement a common risk.

RETROSPECTIVE APPLICATION OF CRIMINAL LAWS IN AUSTRALIA

Australia has no solid constitutional preclusion on ex post facto laws, albeit barely retroactive laws may damage the protected separation of powers standard. Australian courts typically translate rules with a solid assumption that they don't have any significant bearing retroactively. On the first of October 2004, the High Court of Australia settled on two decisions that allowed the continued detention of people previously serving jail sentences for genuine violations. In the first case, the Court dismissed a test to Queensland enactment that approved the State Supreme Court to order continued detention of a detainee when it has sensible grounds to accept that the detainee represents a genuine peril to the community. In the subsequent case, the High Court authorized New South Wales enactment that radically restricted the parole possibilities of specific classes of guilty parties serving life imprisonment. The two choices uncover the questionable idea of the Australian public protection against ex post facto law. An alarming part of these cases was the inadequate consideration paid by the greater parts to the ex post facto nature of these laws.

In another case on retroactive enactment, Yrttiaho v. Open Curator (Queensland), the High Court talked about, at some length, the presence of an assumption against the retroactive nature of a rule. In any case, at no stage did the Court legitimize this assumption. The High Court drew a qualification between statutes that strip vested rights and rules that are just procedural. Without clear words despite what might be expected, instances of the previous sort are to be translated as forthcoming, however, just procedural rules are interpreted as being retrospective. This stipulation would appear to infer that the assumption against retroactivity exists to guarantee that justice is done.

CONCLUSION

In international human rights enactments, the privilege to security from retroactive criminal law is ordinarily qualified by the stipulation that the protection does not have any significant bearing on acts or exclusions which are criminal as indicated by the general standards of law perceived by the state parties. These models are different to such an extent that it is unimaginable to expect to remove a common set of circumstances under which a defendant could be said to relinquish the privilege to protection from retroactive criminal law. Along these lines, it very well may be seen that, regardless of the explanation that the standard of non-retroactivity is a crucial human right (in different proclamations of human rights), retroactive law has been made, and keeps on being made, in social orders which acknowledge that guideline similar to one side. It is not amazing that ex post facto laws of the sort scrutinized in this paper are exceptional in nations that keep up worthy degrees of constitutional government. However, the fascination of this sort of law as intended to short term ends, both great and awful, is ever-present. It is enticing to imagine that democracy is an adequate shield against gross maltreatment of ex post facto law yet history alerts against such confidence. Thus, even where constitutions place no conventional limits the standard of law requests that legislators receive limitations on retroactive enactment as an issue of constitutional practice.