Abuse of Court Process: A Study of How Vanuatu Court of Appeal Has Addressed Abuse of Court Process Over Two Decades
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Courts across common law jurisdictions endeavour to ensure that each litigant gets equal and fair opportunity to present its case, while restraining the abuse of court's process by litigants or their counsels. Decisions by Vanuatu courts demonstrate that they too are constantly challenged to achieve and uphold this delicate balance. Vanuatu’s apex court, the Court of Appeal (CA), affirms it has inherent powers to curb abuse of court’s process sharing the position taken by courts across common law jurisdictions. Additionally, the CA has broad powers to determine appeals from Vanuatu’s Supreme Court (SC), including the powers and jurisdiction of the SC set out under the Civil Procedure Rules 2002 (Rules) to address abuse of court process. The purpose of this article is to explore how the CA has addressed abuse of court’s process by litigants. This article focuses on cases brought before the CA over the past 20 years in which at least one party is the government or a statutory body. Section I of this article discusses how courts and commentators generally understand abuse of court process, and why courts believe it is necessary to address it. Section II sets out the reasons for focusing on cases involving the government or statutory body and limiting CA case review to the last 20 years. Section III describes the powers set out under the Rules that may aid CA in addressing abuse of court process. Court’s inherent powers including its limitations are discussed under Section IV. Section V discusses courts' power to address abuse of court process, and Section VI describes the cases in which CA identified elements of abuse of court process, and how it addressed the issue.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".