Press briefing of Cabinet Decision taken on 2021-03-29

Amendment to the Civil Procedure Code

Recently, motor traffic accidents have alarmingly increased. In order to seek reliefs against such an accident, a case has to be filed in a Civil Court. Here, the victim or his heir has to produce Medico Legal Report and other medical reports and those reports will then be inevitably marked as 'subject to proof'. The victim or his heir is responsible to ensure that the Medical Officer will appear in Courts to testify to prove the contents in the said reports. Since such a motor traffic accident case takes 10 or 12 years of prolonged period for its conclusion, the Government has to incur an unnecessary expenditure burden to summon the relevant Medical Officer to the Court if he serves at a distant location and at the same time, he loses the opportunity to engage his precious time in professional activities. Taking into consideration these matters, the proposal made by the Minister of Justice to instruct the Legal Draftsman to draft legislation to amend the Civil Procedure Code, to provide for considering the Medico-Legal Report, Post Mortem Report and the Bed Head Ticket as prima facie evidence and to enable to provide for shifting the burden of rebutting the Medico-Legal evidence when the defendant contests such evidence, was approved by the Cabinet.