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This Practice Note is concerned with secondary liability, sometimes called accessory liability: the liability that attaches to parties to a Joint enterprise.

In criminal Law, where two or more parties embark on a joint enterprise, as either a principal or secondary party, each will be liable for acts committed in pursuance of that joint enterprise with the necessary intent, unless the principal goes beyond the scope of what was agreed.

In the 2016 cases of R v Jogee and Ruddock v The Queen, the Supreme Court clarified and restored the test for the mental element of intent which must be established when a defendant is accused of being a secondary party to a crime, see News Analysis: Supreme Court rules on ‘joint enterprise’.

Historically, a secondary party could be held responsible for a crime committed by a primary party if the secondary party foresaw the possibility of the primary party committing the crime. This was known as parasitic accessory liability (PAL).

Following R v Jogee, PAL no longer applies as a