question whilst Article 92 of the Court's Rules imposes a duty on parties to file their application for review
within three months upon coming into knowledge of the new facts which necessitate the review application.
In other words, parties have up to five years to discover the new facts which constitute the basis of their
application for review, but they have only three months to file the application for review upon coming into
knowledge of the new facts which support the application.
9. Applicants herein base their application on two grounds namely that oral proceeding was not conducted
at the trial and that evidence was not adduced by the respondents to ground the award of damages.
Applicants argue that these are new and decisive facts which came to their knowledge after the decision
was given.
10. Respondents contend that these are issues that concern the nature of evidence or the procedure at the
trial and cannot be said to be new facts as contemplated by the provisions of Article 25 of Protocol
A/P1/7/91 as applicants were represented throughout the trial. Respondents concluded by stating that the
application for review is statute barred having been filed after three months upon the delivery of the
judgment.
11. The first condition that must be satisfied for a successful review of a judgment/decision of this Court is
that the application for review should have been filed within five years of the date of delivery of the
judgment/decision. From the record, the judgment in the original case was delivered on 28th of January
2009. The application for review was filed on the 30th of July 2009. Thus the application for review was filed
in the same year as the judgment was given in the substantive matter. This fulfills the first condition as it
was filed within the stipulated five year duration within which parties are permitted to discover the facts that
constitute the basis for the review application.
12. We shall consider together whether the facts upon which the application for review is based are new
and decisive and whether they came to the knowledge of the applicants over three months before they filed
their application. We consider a joint consideration of these two issues to be expedient having regard to the
documents filed by the parties.
13. It is important to state at this point that the issue as to when a particular fact came to the knowledge of
the applicant is a question of fact to be determined by the Court after carefully considering all the
information available to it. The facts on which the applicants premised their application for review is that
oral proceedings were not conducted at the trial and that evidence was not adduced by the respondents
herein to ground the award of damages in their favour.
14. Applicants were represented in Court on the date of judgment by their counsel, N. O. lbom. They
therefore knew on that date that oral proceedings wore not conducted at the trial and that oral evidence
was not introduced before the award of damages in plaintiff's favour.
Costs
The defendants/applicants are to bear the costs of this application.
Hon. Justice Awa D. Nana - President
Hon. Justice Hansine n. Donli - Member
Hon. Justice Anthony a. Benin - Member
Tony Anene-Maidoh - Chief Registrar
* Editor's note: The supplementary Protocol has only 12 Articles. The reference made here is Article 13 of
the 1991 Protocol.
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