Matendegyere & Ors v Y. Kasikura & Ors [1992] UGSC 4

Supreme Court · 1992 Preliminary Objection Overruled ✦ AI-generated summary ↓ Download

Jurisdiction

Uganda

Case Type

Application for stay of execution pending appeal, in which the respondent raised a preliminary objection to the Court's jurisdiction to entertain a third appeal

Decision

Preliminary objection to the Court's jurisdiction overruled with costs to the applicant

The full judgment

Read the complete, verbatim text of this judgment.

AI-generated summary. This summary was generated by AI from the full text of the judgment. It may contain errors or omissions — always read the source judgment before relying on it.

Holding

On a preliminary objection that the intended appeal was an incompetent third appeal, the Court held that section 74(1) of the Civil Procedure Act is unambiguous and, on its plain wording, confers a right of appeal from every decree passed in appeal by the High Court without restriction to first and second appeals. The Kenyan authority Sanga v Baya, which read down an equivalent provision by reference to an amended marginal note, was distinguished: the Ugandan legislature left section 74 and its marginal note untouched, so there was no basis to import limiting words from the note. Where a section is clear, its clarity is not to be obscured by the marginal note. The objection was overruled with costs to the applicant.

Facts

The respondents sued the applicants over land in a Grade II Magistrate's Court and lost. Their appeals to the Chief Magistrate's Court also failed, but on 8 March 1988 they succeeded on a further appeal to the High Court. The applicants, as original defendants, filed a notice of appeal to the Supreme Court and, on 27 June 1991, moved for a stay of execution of the High Court decree pending that appeal, asserting they kept some 1,500 head of cattle, crops and homes on the suit land and would be left with nowhere to go if evicted beforehand. An earlier stay application in the High Court had been rejected on the basis that the proper court to grant a stay was the court hearing the appeal. At the hearing of the stay application, the respondents' counsel raised a preliminary objection that the intended appeal, being a third appeal, lay beyond the Court's jurisdiction.

Issues

Whether the Supreme Court has jurisdiction under section 74(1) of the Civil Procedure Act to entertain a third appeal from a decree of the High Court sitting in its appellate jurisdiction.
Whether the marginal note to a statutory provision may be used to restrict the meaning of an otherwise unambiguous section.

Orders

Preliminary objection to jurisdiction overruled.
Costs of the objection to the applicant.

Key headnotes

Civil Procedure — Appeals — Jurisdiction — Right of third appeal under Civil Procedure Act s.74(1)

Section 74(1) of the Civil Procedure Act, on its plain and unambiguous wording, confers a right of appeal to the Supreme Court from every decree passed in appeal by the High Court, and is not confined to first and second appeals; had the legislature intended to restrict the Court's jurisdiction in that way it would have said so expressly.

Statutory Interpretation — Marginal notes — Use only where the section is ambiguous

A marginal note may be looked to only to explain a section where the words of the section are ambiguous; where the wording of a section is unambiguous it is applied without regard to the marginal note, and its clarity is not to be obscured by importing words or phrases inspired by the note.

Statutory Interpretation — Persuasive foreign authority — Distinguishing on the basis of differing legislative history

A foreign decision interpreting a similarly worded provision is distinguishable where the legislative histories differ; the reasoning in Sanga v Baya turned on the Kenyan legislature having specifically amended the marginal note while leaving the section unchanged, a circumstance absent where the local legislature left both the section and its marginal note untouched.

Legislation cited (3)

Civil Procedure Act (Cap. 65) s.74(1)
Rules of Court rule 5(2)(b)
Rules of Court rule 74

Cases cited (1)

Sanga v Baya (1973) E.A. 312

Source: this page presents Wakilii’s issue analysis and metadata for a publicly reported Ugandan judgment. Any AI-generated summary is marked as such. Judgment text is sourced from the Uganda Legal Information Institute (ulii.org). Wakilii is not affiliated with ULII.