MR JUSTICE NICKLIN Approved Judgment
MBR Acres Ltd -v- Curtin
information we received. I was shocked. So we began to have a night-time shift and, hey presto, the van turned up without any police escort and now my intention –once I’m there, apart from the shock of, ‘Oh my God, they’re actually doing this’, there hadn’t been a daytime shipment… for 40 days. I tried to bring it up in court, why are there no more shipments anymore? It wasn’t – I don’t believe it was because of the protestors. They have the police to facilitate that. There was another reason. So I was in shock, it was at night-time, I feel the police had broken their word... They’re sneaking in at night and that’s all. There was no intention to ever stop a van. Other people were always having a go at me, ‘We’ve got to stop the vans’; ‘The police will stop you stopping the vans, the injunction will stop you stopping the vans’… When I spoke to Caroline Bolton after the last hearing, ‘Are we going ahead with this contempt?’, I said, ‘Where’s the obstruction?’, and she said ‘Approaching’. That word ‘approaching’, even I’d sat through the entire injunction, it hadn’t and it still hasn’t −− I don’t think it’s filtered into anyone’s mind actually. What does ‘approaching’ mean? I didn’t have on that night I’m not going to approach a van as in ‘Shame on you’ because that’s breaking the injunction, isn’t it, if we’re going to use the English language? But not to block any van, not to – no.”
252. Mr Curtin confirmed that, as can be seen in the video evidence, he was using his mobile phone to film the incident so that he could post it as evidence to a wider audience. He said saw the injunction as imposing a sort of “ force field ” and he would “ just work around it ”. By that he meant that he was content to observe the terms of the injunction because it enabled Camp Beagle to maintain a presence at the site and he just needed to avoid the Exclusion Zone. 253. I am satisfied, based on the circumstances of the events that gave rise to Ground 2 and Mr Curtin’s evidence, that Mr Curtin had not deliberately flouted the Interim Injunction. It is clear from the audio from the various recordings that emotions were running high early that morning because the nocturnal movement of the dog vans was an unexpected and unwelcome development, so far as the protestors were concerned. Mr Curtin got partly carried away by those emotions. As a result, he approached, and fleetingly obstructed, the van leaving the Wyton Site. That, as he accepts, was a breach of the injunction. I will deal with the penalty for this breach of the Interim Injunction below (see Section O(3): [400]-[407] below). 254. For the purposes of the civil claim against Mr Curtin, his obstruction of the van leaving the Wyton Site in the early hours of 26 April 2022 and his obstruction of the police van on 12 May 2022 were both temporary and, applying the test of what amounts to “public nuisance” (set out in [93] above), it affected only the specific individuals involved rather than the public generally. Insofar as there was any obstruction of the highway on these two occasions, neither amounted to a public nuisance. The police were present on both occasions, and they did not take any action against Mr Curtin, or others, involved in alleged obstruction of the highway. Almost certainly, that reflects the fact that any obstruction was very short-lived and required no police intervention. 21 June 2022 255. The Claimants allege that, on 21 June 2022, Mr Curtin flew a drone directly over the Wyton Site, at a height of less than 150m and/or 50m, without the permission of the
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