Tanzania Court of Appeal Rule 96: Record of Appeal Formatting Requirements

For advocates preparing an appeal to the Court of Appeal of Tanzania, Rule 96 of the Tanzania Court of Appeal Rules, 2009 (Government Notice 368 of 2009) is the provision that decides whether your record of appeal is competent. Among its requirements is one that catches practitioners out again and again: every tenth line of each page of the record must be indicated in the right-hand margin.

What Rule 96 requires

Rule 96 governs the contents and form of the record of appeal. In summary, the record must:

• contain the prescribed documents — the pleadings, the judgment or ruling appealed from, the decree or order, the notice of appeal and the other documents the rule lists;
• be paginated and properly bound;
• be formatted so that every tenth line of each page is indicated in the right-hand margin — the tenth lining requirement; and
• under Rule 96(5), carry the advocate’s certification of the correctness of each copy of the record.

The case law: appeals have been struck out over this

This is not a theoretical risk. In decisions applying Rule 96, the Court of Appeal has upheld preliminary objections against records of appeal that failed the formatting requirements — including records where the tenth lines were not indicated in the margin. Rulings from 2016 onwards (citing Rule 96(1)(f) and (k)) show respondents successfully attacking appeals on precisely this ground. An appeal struck out for a defective record means starting again: fresh application, extension of time, months lost and costs awarded against your client.

The 2019 amendment softened — but did not remove — the risk

The Tanzania Court of Appeal (Amendment) Rules, GN 344 of 2019, amended Rule 96 and gave the Court more room to allow a party to cure defects by lodging a supplementary record of appeal within a set period, instead of striking the appeal out at the first defect. That is real relief — but it is discretionary, it costs you a hearing and weeks of delay, and the underlying formatting obligations, tenth lining included, remain mandatory. The cheapest compliance is getting the record right the first time.

Formatting checklist for the record of appeal

• All documents required by Rule 96 included, in order.
• Pages numbered consecutively through the record.
• Every tenth line of each page indicated in the right-hand margin.
• Record properly bound.
• Each copy certified as correct by the advocate (Rule 96(5)).
• Formatting re-checked after any late change — inserting a page or a paragraph shifts every line number after it.

Automating the tenth lining step

Manually numbering every tenth line across a record that can run to hundreds of pages is exactly the kind of work that produces the defects the case law punishes. TenthLiner applies tenth line numbering to the right-hand margin automatically: upload the PDF or Word (.docx) document, preview the numbered output, and download a compliant, court-ready record in seconds.