Royal Ulster Constabulary (Conduct) (Senior Officer) Regulations 2000

Attendance of complainant at hearing

19.—(1) This regulation shall apply where there has been a complaint against the senior officer concerned.

(2) Notwithstanding anything in regulation 15(1) but subject to paragraph (3), (4) and (6), the tribunal shall allow the complainant to attend the hearing while witnesses are being examined, or cross-examined, and the complainant may at the discretion of the tribunal be accompanied by a friend or relative.

(3) Where the complainant or any person allowed to accompany him is to be called as a witness at the hearing, he and any person allowed to accompany him shall not be allowed to attend before he gives his evidence.

(4) Where it appears to the tribunal that a witness may, in giving evidence, disclose information which, in the public interest, ought not to be disclosed to a member of public, it shall require the complainant and any person allowed to accompany him to withdraw while that evidence is given.

(5) Where the senior officer concerned gives evidence, then after the person presenting the case has had an opportunity of cross-examining him, the tribunal shall put to him any questions which the complainant requests should be so put and might have been properly so put by way of cross-examination and, at its discretion may allow the complainant himself to put such questions to the senior officer concerned.

(6) Subject as aforesaid, the complainant and any person allowed to accompany him shall neither intervene in, nor interrupt, the hearing; and if he or such a person should behave in a disorderly or abusive manner, or otherwise misconduct himself, the tribunal may exclude him from the remainder of the hearing.

(7) In this regulation a reference to the complainant is a reference to the originator of the complaint notwithstanding that it was transmitted to the Ombudsman by some other person or by some other body.