PART 5 Rule 66 REOPENING A HEARING
The protest committee may reopen a hearing when it decides that it may have made a significant error, or when significant new evidence becomes available within a reasonable time. It shall reopen a hearing when required by the national authority under rule 71.2 or R5. A party to the hearing may ask for a reopening no later than 24 hours after being informed of the decision. On the last scheduled day of racing the request shall be delivered (a) within the protest time limit if the requesting party was informed of the decision on the previous day;
(b) no later than 30 minutes after the party was informed of the decision on that day.
When a hearing is reopened, a majority of the members of the protest committee shall, if possible, be members of the original protest committee.
Only a party to a hearing can ask for a reopening. When a boat is aggrieved over the redress given to another boat in a hearing to which the aggrieved boat was not a party, she has no right to ask for a reopening. All she can do is to request redress herself1
. The procedure is that when a reopening has been asked for by a party, the
boat’s representative will be called before the protest committee to explain the reason for asking for a reopening. No other party to the hearing is present. The protest committee decides whether the evidence is new, or if it may have made a mistake. If either applies, the hearing is reopened.
In SC 99, Daffodil did not attend the hearing of a protest against her, despite the fact of the protest and the time and place of the hearing having been posted on the official notice board. She was disqualified, and, learning of this several days later, she requested a reopening, her ‘new’ evidence being that she disagreed with the facts found and the diagram, and that she had a different story to tell. The CYA upheld the protest committee’s decision not to reopen. ‘The new evidence was nothing more than Daffodil’s version of the facts. This is, presumably, the same testimony she would have given if she had attended the hearing, and is therefore not considered to be new.’ It follows that if a boat has a good reason for not having attended a protest hearing, the protest committee should be more sympathetic to a reopening if a different story will be told.
Appendix M 4 advises the protest committee then to ‘hear the party making the request, look at any video, etc., and decide whether there is any significant new evidence that might lead you to change your decision. Decide whether your interpretation of the rules may have been wrong; be open-minded as to whether you have made a mistake. If none of these applies refuse to reopen; otherwise schedule a hearing.’
In RYA 2008/3, the protest committee decided to reopen without either circumstance applying. When it then heard evidence that had in fact been available at the time of its original hearing, it realised it had made a mistake, and changed its decision. When it referred the whole process to the RYA for confirmation, the revised decision, although now correct, was held to be invalid. However, the RYA corrected the original valid (but incorrect) decision in line with the later invalid (but correct) decision.
A former Q&A said that a ‘reasonable time’ is a subjective limit determined by the protest committee, taking into account what is fair for all competitors in relation to the event being sailed.
However, the rule now includes words that were previously a recommended sailing instruction concerning specific time limits for requests to reopen on the last day of an event.
1 RYA 1994/3: the converse is that a boat unhappy about redress granted in a hearing to which she is a party cannot use redress as a means of contesting it, because of rule 62.1(a): her only option is to ask for a reopening under rule 66.
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