[2024] UKUT 287 (AAC)

The grounds of appeal in this case require us also to consider issues of procedural fairness and judicial notice, as to which we have directed ourselves as follows.

As to procedural fairness, it is well established, as Lord Mustill put it in Re D [1996] AC 593 at 603:

“it is a first principle of fairness that each party to a judicial process shall have an opportunity to answer by evidence and argument any adverse material which the tribunal may take into account when forming its opinion.”

As to judicial notice, in Scott v Attorney General [2017] UKPC 15 (“Scott”) the Privy Council held:

“40.

Judicial notice is the acceptance by the courts of facts or a state of affairs which are so notorious, or so clearly established, that evidence of their existence is deemed unnecessary. As Cross and Tapper on Evidence 12th ed (2010), p 76 state:

“Judicial notice refers to facts which a judge can be called upon to

receive and to act upon either from his general knowledge of them, or from inquiries to be made by himself for his own information from sources to which it is proper for him to refer.”

41.

Moreover, the party seeking judicial notice of a fact “has the burden of convincing the judge (a) that the matter is so notorious as not to be the subject of dispute among reasonable men, or (b) the matter is capable of immediate accurate demonstration by resort to readily accessible sources of indisputable accuracy” - Morgan, Some Problems of Proof under the Anglo-American System of Litigation 36.”

The Privy Council in that case considered it “plainly impossible” to take judicial notice of the difference in cost of living between the Bahamas and England.