CHAPTER V
THE RECORDING AND TRANSCRIBING OF PROCEEDINGS
1.
If there is one problem more urgently pressed on me than any
other it is the lack of means of recording proceedings. Courts and
Tribunals of original jurisdiction are courts of record and therefore
appeals from them are based on the record and not by way of re-hearing.
That means the lower court inust supply the appellate court with a copy
of the record of evidence and judgment or summing-up if asked to do so.
The litigating parties and others are entitled to copies and still
others may have copies by leave of the judge. Therefore a record must
be kept and be as near verbatim as possible. Proceedings can be
recorded in one of four ways:
(1) traditional shorthand writers
make
manuscript shorthand note,
(2) other court reporters use shorthand machines;
(3) sound recording machines can record the
proceedings on tape or;
(4) failing any of those, the Judge, Magistrate,
Presiding Officer or Adjudicator takes a full note in long hand manuscript.
Methods (1) and (2) are available in Hong Kong but usually only for High Court crime; an experiment in sound recording is in progress in
one of the High Court civil courts. In all the other courts of the
High Court and in the whole of the District Court, the Magistracies, Tribunals and the Coroner's Court the record is kept by the judge.
2.
The end product of the recording process is a legible
verbatim transcript the purpose of which is quite different from that
of a note made exclusively for his own purposes by the judge. In by no
means every case is a transcript required and where one is it may be
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