would capture future protesters who were not parties to the proceedings at the time when the injunction was granted. He refused to grant a final injunction.
101. The Court of Appeal dismissed the claimants’ appeal. It held, first, that service of proceedings is important in the delivery of justice. The general rule is that service of the originating process is the act by which the defendant is subjected to the court’s jurisdiction – and that a person cannot be made subject to the jurisdiction without having such notice of the proceedings as will enable him to be heard. Here there was no satisfactory evidence that the steps taken by the claimants were such as could reasonably be expected to have drawn the proceedings to the attention of the respondent unknown persons; the claimants had never sought an order for alternative service under CPR rule 6.15 and there was never any proper basis for an order under CPR rule 6.16 dispensing with service. 102. Secondly, the Court of Appeal held that the court may grant an interim injunction before proceedings have been served (or even issued) against persons who wish to join an ongoing protest, and that it is also, in principle, open to the court in appropriate circumstances to limit even lawful activity where there is no other proportionate means of protecting the claimants’ rights, as for example in Hubbard v Pitt [1976] QB 142 (protesting outside an estate agency), and Burris v Azadani [1995] 1 WLR 1372 (entering a modest exclusion zone around the claimant’s home), and to this extent the requirements for a newcomer injunction explained in Ineos required qualification. But in this case, the description of the “persons unknown” was impermissibly wide; the prohibited acts were not confined to unlawful acts; and the interim injunction failed to provide for a method of alternative service which was likely to bring the order to the attention of the persons unknown. The court was therefore justified in discharging the interim injunction. proceedings. As authority for that proposition, the court cited Attorney General v Times Newspapers Ltd per Lord Oliver at p 224 (quoted at para 39 above). That, the court said, was consistent with the fundamental principle in Cameron that a person cannot be made subject to the jurisdiction of the court without having such notice of the proceedings as will enable him to be heard. It followed, in the court’s view, that a final injunction could not be granted against newcomers who had not by that time committed the prohibited acts, since they did not fall within the description of “persons unknown” and had not been served with the claim form. This was not one of the very limited cases, such as Venables , in which a final injunction could be granted against the whole world. Nor was it a case where there was scope for making persons unknown subject to a final order. That was only possible (and perfectly legitimate) provided the persons unknown were confined to those in the first category of unknown persons in Cameron – that is to say anonymous defendants who were nonetheless identifiable in some other way (para 91). 103. Thirdly, the Court of Appeal held (para 89) that a final injunction could not be granted in a protester case against persons unknown who were not parties at the date of the final order, since a final injunction operated only between the parties to the
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