MR JUSTICE NICKLIN Approved Judgment
MBR Acres Ltd -v- Curtin
to what was contemplated or reasonably foreseeable at the time of the aiding, abetting, counselling or procuring. (4) ‘Conduct’ includes speech. (5) References to a person, in the context of the harassment of a person, are references to a person who is an individual.”
103. A defendant has a defence if s/he shows: (i) that the course of conduct was pursued for the purpose of preventing or detecting crime; and/or (ii) that in the particular circumstances the pursuit of the course of conduct was reasonable (s.1(3)). 104. Assessing whether conduct amounts to or involves harassment, and whether any defendant has a defence under s.1(3), can be difficult and is always highly fact specific. In Hayden -v- Dickenson [2020] EWHC 3291 (QB) [44], I reviewed the relevant authorities and identified the following principles (with citations mostly omitted): “(i) Harassment is an ordinary English word with a well understood meaning: it is a persistent and deliberate course of unacceptable and oppressive conduct, targeted at another person, which is calculated to and does cause that person alarm, fear or distress; ‘ a persistent and deliberate course of targeted oppression ’… (ii) The behaviour said to amount to harassment must reach a level of seriousness passing beyond irritations, annoyances, even a measure of upset, that arise occasionally in everybody’s day-to-day dealings with other people. The conduct must cross the boundary between that which is unattractive, even unreasonable, and conduct which is oppressive and unacceptable. To cross the border from the regrettable to the objectionable, the gravity of the misconduct must be of an order which would sustain criminal liability under s.2… A course of conduct must be grave before the offence or tort of harassment is proved… (iii) The provision, in s.7(2) PfHA, that ‘ references to harassing a person include alarming the person or causing the person distress ’ is not a definition of the tort and it is not exhaustive. It is merely guidance as to one element of it… It does not follow that any course of conduct which causes alarm or distress therefore amounts to harassment; that would be illogical and produce perverse results… (iv) s.1(2) provides that the person whose course of conduct is in question ought to know that it involves harassment of another if a reasonable person in possession of the same information would think the course of conduct involved harassment. The test is wholly objective… ‘ The Court’s assessment of the harmful tendency of the statements complained of must always be objective, and not swayed by the subjective feelings of the claimant ’… (v) Those who are ‘ targeted ’ by the alleged harassment can include others ‘ who are foreseeably, and directly, harmed by the course of targeted conduct of which complaint is made, to the extent that they can properly be described as victims of it ’…
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