Judgment No CCZ 8/16 22 Const. Application No CCZ 48/15 on parole availed to other prisoners they operate to deny them the constitutional guarantee of the right to equal protection and benefit of the law. Apart from the argument that persons sentenced to life imprisonment would have been so sentenced for having committed some heinous or atrocious crime, the respondents have proffered no reasonable or justifiable basis for the limitation of their rights within the contemplation of s 86 of the Constitution. It is not clear what legitimate public interest is served by depriving life prisoners of the possibility of their release following an appropriate period of reformative and rehabilitative incarceration. In the absence of any such justification, it follows that the impugned provisions are unconstitutional to the extent that they exclude whole life prisoners from the parole process and thereby contravene the right to equal protection and benefit of the law under s 56(1) of the Constitution. This conclusion per se does not end the present enquiry. It is still necessary to consider the objectives of the impugned provisions in the context of their potential scope of coverage, i.e. their possible extension to all prisoners undergoing imprisonment, whatever the length of their period of imprisonment, including whole life prisoners. In this regard, I am unable to perceive any rational or practical objection to applying the reporting procedures and powers of release vested in the authorities under Part XX of the Prisons Act to those prisoners who have been sentenced to life imprisonment. In principle, this approach is perfectly concordant with para 10 of the Sixth Schedule to the Constitution, which provides for the continuation of existing laws, as follows: “Subject to this Schedule, all existing laws continue in force but must be construed in conformity with this Constitution.”