section of the Penal Code so as to enact ex post facto a new offence to meet the circumstances of the abortive coup. The Act empowered the Minister of Justice to nominate the three Judges to try the appellants without a jury. The validity of the Act was challenged as well as the nomination which had been made by the Minister of Justice of the three Judges. The Ceylon Supreme Court upheld the objection about the vires of some of the provisions of the Act as well as the nomination of the Judges. Subsequently, the Act was amended and the power of nomination of the Judges was conferred on the Chief Justice. The appellants having been convicted at the trial before a court of three Judges nominated under the amended Act, went up in appeal before the Judicial Committee. It was contended that the Acts of 1962 offended against the Constitution in that they amounted to a direction to convict the appellants or to a legislative plan to secure the conviction and severe punishment of the appellants and thus constituted an unjustifiable assumption of judicial power by the legislature, or an interference with judicial power which was outside the legislature's competence. 303. The Privy Council said in the course of their judgment that the pith and substance of the law enactments was a legislative plan ex post facto to secure the conviction, that although legislation ad hominem which is directed to the course of particular proceedings may not always amount to an interference with the functions of the judiciary, but in the present case they had no doubt that there was such interference; that it was not only the likely but the intended effect of the impugned enactments and that it was fatal to their validity. They further said that the true nature and purpose of these enactments were revealed by their conjoint impact on the specific proceedings in respect of which they were designed and they took their colour, in particular from the alterations they purported to make as to their ultimate objective–the punishment of those convicted–and that these alterations constituted a grave and deliberate incursion into the judicial sphere and then, they quoted with approval the observations of Blackstone already referred to; See Blackstone; Commetaries, Vol. I, p. 44. These observations have great relevance to the case in hand. True it is that their Lordships did not decide the question whether by a constitutional amendment the result could have been achieved or not. 304. At the time when the Amendment was passed, the appeal filed by the appellant and the cross appeal of the respondent were pending before the Supreme Court. Clause (4) was legislation ad hominem directed against the course of the hearing of the appeals on merits as the appeal and the cross appeal were to be disposed of in accordance with that clause and not by applying the law to the facts as ascertained by the court. This was a direct interference with the decision of these appeals by the Supreme Court on their merits by a legislative judgment. 305. If the amending body really exercised judicial power that power was exercised in violation of the principles of natural justice of audi alteram partem. Even if a power is given to a body, without specifying that the rules