THE HONOURABLE MR JUSTICE NICKLIN Approved Judgment
MBR Acres Ltd -v- McGivern
G: Submissions 64.
For the Claimants, Ms Bolton’s fundamental submissions were straightforward. Ms McGivern became subject to the injunction by doing an act or acts that brought her within the definition of one or more categories of the Fifteenth to Seventeenth “Persons Unknown”. Thereafter, she is taken to have sufficient notice of the terms of the Injunction by operation of the alternative service order. This conclusion is a product of principles established by South Cambridgeshire District Council -v- Gammell [2006] 1 WLR 658 and Cuciurean -v- Secretary of State for Transport [2021] EWCA Civ 357 . 65. First, as to capturing people as defendants by operation of the definition of “persons unknown”, there is the Court of Appeal decision in Gammell . Sir Anthony Clarke MR explained: [32] In each of these appeals the appellant became a party to the proceedings when she did an act which brought her within the definition of defendant in the particular case. Thus in the case of WM she became a person to whom the injunction was addressed and a defendant when she caused her three caravans to be stationed on the land on 20 September 2004. In the case of KG she became both a person to whom the injunction was addressed and the defendant when she caused or permitted her caravans to occupy the site. In neither case was it necessary to make her a defendant to the proceedings later. 66. The Gammell principle – that people can subsequently fall within the definition of Persons Unknown as a result of doing some act after the grant of the interim injunction – has been recognised in subsequent decisions: Cameron [15]; Ineos Upstream Ltd -v- Persons Unknown [2019] 4 WLR 100 [30]; Canada Goose UK Retail Ltd -v- Persons Unknown [2020] 1 WLR 2802 [66] and most recently in LB Barking & Dagenham -v- Persons Unknown [2022] 2 WLR 946 [25]-[31]. 67. I would note however, that, in the following parts of his judgment in Barking , Sir Geoffrey Vos MR suggested that the Gammell principle operated to make a newcomer a party to the proceedings (and bound by an injunction) only when s/he had knowingly breached the injunction (emphasis added): “[ Gammell ] decided that there was no need to join newcomers to an action in which injunctions against persons unknown had been granted and knowingly violated by those newcomers” [30] “… it was essential to the reasoning [in Gammell ] that such injunctions, whether interim or final, applied in their full force to newcomers with knowledge of them” [31]; “Lord Sumption [in Cameron ] seems to have accepted that, where an action was brought against unknown trespassers, newcomers could, as Sir Anthony Clarke MR had said in Gammell , make themselves parties to the action by (knowingly) doing one of the prohibited acts. This makes perfect sense, of course, because Lord Sumption’s thesis was that, for proceedings to be competent, they had to be served. Once Ms Gammell knowingly breached the injunction, she was both aware of the proceedings and made herself a party” [37]; and finally
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