Section 201: Forwarding File When Appeal Service Fails

Supreme Court decisions interpreting this section

1. Supreme Court Judgment No. 226/2567 (2024)

   Where a copy of the appeal cannot be served because the summons was sent to a place that was not the defendant's lawful domicile, this is not a failure to find or a case of absconding under Section 201, and the court must serve at the defendant's actual domicile, here the central prison where the defendant was held.

   The court treated a failed service as a Section 201 excuse, but the failure came from sending the notice to the wrong address rather than the defendant being untraceable. The Supreme Court held service was defective and that the appeal copy had to be served on the defendant at the central prison that was his domicile at that time.

2. Supreme Court Judgment No. 5868/2557 (2014)

   Failure to serve a copy of the appeal merely because the defendant's house could not be located is not a case of the defendant being untraceable, absconding, or refusing under Section 201; the Court of Appeal deciding the case without serving the appeal was contrary to Section 200.

   Records showed the defendant's house existed at the address in the charge and a copy could be received by a substitute, so the earlier failure to find the house did not meet Section 201. The Court of Appeal judgment was set aside and the trial court ordered to serve the appeal and send the case back for fresh adjudication.

3. Supreme Court Judgment No. 3244/2563 (2020)

   Section 200, which requires the court to send a copy of the appeal to the other side to answer within fifteen days, is a special provision for criminal cases, and section 195 paragraph 2 allows an appellant or the court to raise any failure to comply with the Code's appeal provisions. The rule in Civil Procedure Code section 27 on setting aside irregular proceedings therefore cannot be applied to it, and an appellate court that refuses such a motion for not meeting the section 27 requirements is wrong. On the merits, where the copy of the appeal was sent to the address given in the charge and taken by a person under twenty, which would ordinarily make service bad, but the defendant was not living at that address at the time and was later found to have been offending in another case, service is treated as impossible because the defendant could not be found, had absconded, or deliberately refused to accept it, and under section 201 the court is right to send the file straight to the Court of Appeal.

   The first defendant applied to have the appeal proceedings set aside on the ground that the copy of the appeal had not been properly served. The Court of Appeal Region 1 dismissed the application because it did not meet the requirements for setting aside irregular proceedings under Civil Procedure Code section 27. The Supreme Court held that reasoning wrong: section 200 is a special provision for criminal appeals and section 195 paragraph 2 provides its own route for raising non compliance, so section 27 has no application and the defendant was entitled to make the application. On the merits, however, although the copy had been taken by a person under twenty at the address given in the charge, which would ordinarily make service bad, the first defendant was not living there at the time and was afterwards found to have been offending in another case. Service was therefore impossible within section 201 and sending the file to the Court of Appeal was lawful. The Supreme Court agreed with the outcome only, not with the Court of Appeal's reasoning, and dismissed this part of the appeal.

Curated decisions with case numbers verified against the Supreme Court database. English renderings are the firm's editorial translation for study.