Ramanathan Chetty v. Lakshmanan Chetty

1. This is an appeal from the judgment of the Subordinate Judge of Ramnad in a suit brought by the plaintiff on a foreign judgment against defendant 1 and the father of defendant 3. The learned Subordinate Judge in para 6 of his judgment correctly stated what was necessary to give a foreign Court jurisdiction, so as to enable its judgment to be sued on here. But he overlooked Section 14 of the CPC, when he held that the onus was on the plaintiff to show that these conditions were satisfied and that the plaintiff had failed to discharge the onus. S. 14 says:

“The Court shall presume upon the production of any document purporting to be a certified copy of a foreign judgment, that such judgment was pronounced by a Court of competent jurisdiction, unless the contrary appears on the record; but such presumption may be displaced by proving want of jurisdiction.”

2. Therefore under this section, the onus was clearly upon the defendants to prove want of jurisdiction.

3. Jurisdiction may arise in a variety of ways, as by residence or by submission and possibly in other ways which it is not necessary to enumerate. When the section says that the defendant must prove want of jurisdiction, prima facie, it seems to us that he must give evidence that none of these conditions which would give jurisdiction were present, and that appears to be the law in England.

4. In Bullen and Leake's Precedents on Pleadings, Edn. 2 of 1863 at p. 167, it is said:

“a declaration (or in cur language a plaint), upon the judgment of a foreign Court need not state that the Court had jurisdiction over the parties or the cause [Robertson v. Struth(1) every presumption being made in favour of a foreign judgment.”

5. If every presumption is to be made in favour of a foreign judgment, it will be presumed that, if the parties were not present, they submitted to the judgment. Therefore the result is that the learned Subordinate Judge threw the onus on the wrong side. Defendant 1 did not appear, and there is no question at all about his liability. Defendant, 3 who is the son of defendant 2 in the Penang suit went into the box and said that his father had never been in Penang, but he did not say that the father had not submitted to the jurisdiction of the Penang Court. He did not therefore discharge the burden and it is unnecessary to refer to the evidence which Mr. Krishnaswami Ayyar for the appellant was anxious to put in as to what actually happened in the Penang Court.

6. In the result the appeal must be allowed and the suit decreed with costs throughout—but save as regards the defendant 1 only—to the extent of the joint family property in the lands of the defendants respectively.

S.N/R.K

7. Appeal allowed.