Rule 3: The foreign rule on which reliance is placed must be relevant  The overarching standard for reference to foreign law is that it must be relevant to the decision  Clearly, where one of the parties has strongly relied on foreign law, it is incumbent on the judge to deal with these arguments  This makes foreign law relevant to the case in a weak sense  A foreign rule referred to in argument may nevertheless be dismissed as irrelevant in the strong sense  Relevance in the strong sense is a function of: (a) the similarity between the legal systems being compared; and (b) the facts and law implicated in the case at hand  Dimension (a) makes reference to the law of other Commonwealth African countries with similar constitutional histories presumptively more relevant in Commonwealth African courts  Dimension (b) means that some of the techniques judges ordinarily use to deal with the applicability of binding domestic precedent may be applied mutatis mutandis to the use of foreign law
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