High Court Judgment Template

outside the principles which regulate the grant of interim injunctions. Then the respondents (like the Court of Appeal) rely upon the Gammell solution (that a newcomer becomes a defendant by acting in breach of the interim injunction) as solving both problems, because it makes them parties to the proceedings leading to the final injunction (even if they then take no part in them) and justifies the interim injunction against newcomers as a way of smoking them out before trial. In sympathy with the Court of Appeal on this point we consider that this constant focus upon the duality of interim and final injunctions is ultimately unhelpful as an analytical tool for solving the problem of injunctions against newcomers. In our view the injunction, in its operation upon newcomers, is typically neither interim nor final, at least in substance. Rather it is, against newcomers, what is now called a without notice (ie in the old jargon ex parte) injunction, that is an injunction which, at the time when it is ordered, operates against a person who has not been served in due time with the application so as to be able to oppose it, who may have had no notice (even informal) of the intended application to court for the grant of it, and who may not at that stage even be a defendant served with the proceedings in which the injunction is sought. This is so regardless of whether the injunction is in form interim or final. 140. More to the point, the injunction typically operates against a particular newcomer before (if ever) the newcomer becomes a party to the proceedings, as we have explained at paras 129-132 above. An ordinarily law-abiding newcomer, once notified of the existence of the injunction (eg by seeing a copy of the order at the relevant site or by reading it on the internet), may be expected to comply with the injunction rather than act in breach of it. At the point of compliance that person will not be a defendant, if the defendants are defined as persons who behave in the manner restrained. Unless they apply to do so they will never become a defendant. If the person is a Traveller, they will simply pass by the prohibited site rather than camp there. They will not identify themselves to the claimant or to the court by any conspicuous breach, nor trigger the Gammell process by which, under the current orthodoxy, they are deemed then to become a defendant by self-identification. Even if the order was granted at a formally interim stage, the compliant Traveller will not ever become a party to the proceedings. They will probably never become aware of any later order in final form, unless by pure coincidence they pass by the same site again looking for somewhere to camp. Even if they do, and are again dissuaded, this time by the final injunction, they will not have been a party to the proceedings when the final order was made, unless they breached it at the interim stage. 141. In considering whether injunctions of this type comply with the standards of procedural and substantive fairness and justice by which the courts direct themselves, it is the compliant (law-abiding) newcomer, not the contemptuous breaker of the injunction, who ought to be regarded as the paradigm in any process of evaluation. Courts grant injunctions on the assumption that they will generally be obeyed, not as stage one in a process intended to lead to committal for contempt: see para 129 above, and the cases there cited, with which we agree. Furthermore the evaluation of potential injustice inherent in the process of granting injunctions against newcomers is more

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