Preface

52
a while and satisfy itself on whether the appeal is competent bearing in mind the
respondent's claim before the lower court and the legal capacity of the appellant to
file the appeal. These two issues touch on jurisdiction of this panel to hear this
appeal and the issue of jurisdiction is so fundamental that once it surfaces in a trial,
it has to be settled first. If the issues are resolved in favour of the appellant this
panel will then proceed to determine the appeal on its merit. If however, the appeal
is found to be incompetent, viewed from any of, or the two perspective highlighted
above, there will be no need to go into the merit of the appeal because that will be
a judicial exercise in futility.
Section 137A (6) of the 1997 constitution of the Gambia provides: "The
Panel shall have jurisdiction to hear and determine appeals from judgment of
the Cadi Court and from the District Tribunals where Sharia law is involved"
Going by the above constitutional provision this panel is only competent to hear
appeals from the decisions of the District Tribunals of the Gambia in so far as
those decisions emanate from claims based on Sharia law.
Unfortunately, the record of proceeding placed before this panel did not, in
categorical terms, reproduce the claim of the respondent against the defendant as
presented by him in his capacity as plaintiff in the lower court. But from the
totality of the respondent's evidence and the two witnesses presented by him, this
panel inferred that the respondent sued the defendant before the lower court for
enticing the appellant (his wife) to desert him when all attempts to amicably stop
the defendant from committing the atrocities against him failed. This can be seen
in the following instances:
1. The respondent's prayer to the court at page 3 paragraph 2 of the record of
proceedings: "During all this rampancy that the defendant was doing to me