Jockey Club v Persons unknown
SIR ANTHONY MANN Approved Judgment
Relevant law
14. The ability of the courts to grant injunctions against persons unknown, and the requirements for the exercise of that jurisdiction, have recently (and since my first judgment) been the subject of consideration by the Supreme Court in Wolverhampton City Council v London Gypsies and Travellers [2024] 2 WLR 45. The case deals with “persons unknown” who are sought to be barred, being persons who are not identifiable as parties to the proceedings at the time when the injunction is granted, as opposed to persons whose current attributes are known but whose identities are not. In that case the persons unknown were Travellers. That category of persons unknown were designated as “newcomers”, and injunctions of the kind sought in that case, and in other protester cases, were call ed “newcomer injunctions". I shall, of course, adopt the same nomenclature. 15. The court analysed the jurisdiction to grant injunctions against such persons and found that injunctions which in other contexts would be regarded as “final” (as opposed to interim) were not in fact properly so regarded but were of a distinct kind. After an extensive review the court held:
“139 … 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. ”
16.
This has consequences as to the requirements:
“142. Recognition that injunctions against newcomers are in substance always a type of without notice injunction, whether in form interim or final, is in our view the starting point in a reliable assessment of the question whether they should be made at all and, if so, by reference to what principles and subject to what safeguards. Viewed in that way they then need to be set against the established categories of injunction to see whether they fall into an existing legitimate class, or, if not, whether they display features by reference to which they may be regarded as a legitimate extension of the court’s practice.”
17. That case involved Travellers, but while that context informed some of the requirements that the court indicated should be fulfilled before an injunction is granted, most of its
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