High Court Judgment Template

application. They take the issue raised in the present case little further on the question of principle. The facts of the cases were extreme in imposing real compulsion on the court to do something effective. Above all, the court was driven in each case to make the order by a perception that the risk to the claimants’ Convention rights placed it under a positive duty to act. There is no real parallel between the facts in those cases and the facts of a typical Traveller case. The local authority has no Convention rights to protect, and such Convention rights of the public in its locality as a newcomer injunction might protect are of an altogether lower order. 111. The next in time is the Bloomsbury case, the facts and reasoning in which were summarised in paras 58-59 above. The case was analysed by Lord Sumption in Cameron by reference to the distinction which he drew at para 13, as explained earlier, between cases concerned with anonymous defendants who were identifiable but whose names were unknown, such as squatters occupying a property, and cases concerned with defendants, such as most hit and run drivers, who were not only anonymous but could not be identified. The distinction was of critical importance, in Lord Sumption’s view, because a defendant in the first category of case could be served with the claim form or other originating process, whereas a defendant in the second category could not, and consequently could not be given such notice of the proceedings as would enable him to be heard, as justice required. 112. Lord Sumption added at para 15 that where an interim injunction was granted and could be specifically enforced against some property or by notice to third parties who would necessarily be involved in any contempt, the process of enforcing it would sometimes be enough to bring the proceedings to the defendant’s attention. He cited Bloomsbury as an example, stating:

“the unnamed defendants would have had to identify themselves as the persons in physical possession of copies of the book if they had sought to do the prohibited act, namely disclose it to people (such as newspapers) who had been notified of the injunction.”

113. Lord Sumption categorised Cameron itself as a case in the second category, stating at para 16:

“One does not, however, identify an unknown person simply by referring to something that he has done in the past. ‘The person unknown driving vehicle registration number Y598 SPS who collided with vehicle registration number KG03 ZJZ on 26 May 2013’, does not identify anyone. It does not enable

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