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Contempt of Court - From: 1990 To: 1990
This page lists 6 cases, and was prepared on 02 April 2018.
Temporal v Temporal [1990] 2 FLR 98
1990
Contempt of Court, Litigation Practice
A mandatory order is not enforceable by committal unless it specifies the time for compliance
1 Citers
Attorney-General for Tuvalu v Philatelic Distribution Corporation Ltd [1990] 1 WLR 926
1990
CA
Woolf LJ
Contempt of Court, Company
Where a company is ordered not to do certain acts or gives an undertaking to the like effect and a director of that company is aware of the order or undertaking he is under a duty to take reasonable steps to ensure that the order or undertaking is obeyed, and that if he wilfully fails to take those steps and the order or undertaking is breached he can be punished for contempt. It is his own culpable conduct which exposes him to that liability.
Woolf LJ said: "In our view where a company is ordered not to do certain acts or gives an undertaking to like effect and a director of that company is aware of that order or undertaking he is under a duty to take reasonable steps to ensure that the order or undertaking is obeyed, and if he wilfully fails to take those steps and the order or undertaking is breached he can be punished for contempt. We use the word "wilful" to distinguish the situation where the director can reasonably believe some other director or officer is taking those steps."
1 Citers
Johnson v Walton; 1990 - [1990] 1 FLR 350
X Ltd v Morgan-Grampian (Publishers) Ltd [1991] 1 AC 1; [1990] 2 All ER 1; [1990] 2 WLR 1000
1990
HL
Lord Bridge of Harwich, Lord Oliver
Contempt of Court
In a case where a contemnor not only fails wilfully and contumaciously to comply with an order of the court but makes it clear that he will continue to defy the court's authority if the order should be affirmed on appeal, the court must have a discretion to decline to entertain his appeal against the order.
Lord Bridge of Harwich said: "But the question whether disclosure is necessary in the interests of justice gives rise to a more difficult problem of weighing one public interest against another. A question arising under this part of section 10 has not previously come before your Lordships' House for decision. In discussing the section generally Lord Diplock said in Secretary of State for Defence v Guardian Newspapers Ltd [1985] AC 339: 'The exceptions include no reference to "the public interest" generally and I would add that in my view the expression "justice", the interests of which are entitled to protection, is not used in a general sense as the antonym of "injustice" but in the technical sense of the administration of justice in the course of legal proceedings in a court of law, or, by reason of the extended definition of "court" in section 19 of the Act of 1981, before a tribunal or body exercising the judicial power of the state.'
I agree entirely with the first half of this dictum. To construe 'justice' as the antonym of 'injustice' in section 10 would be far too wide. Bu$t to confine it to 'the technical sense of the administration of justice in the course of legal proceedings in a court of law' seems to me, with all respect due to any dictum of the late Lord Diplock, to be too narrow. It is, in my opinion, 'in the interests of justice', in the sense in which this phrase is used in section 10, that persons should be enabled to exercise important legal rights and to protect themselves from serious legal wrongs whether or not resort to legal proceedings in a court of law will be necessary to attain these objectives. Thus, to take a very obvious example, if an employer of a large staff is suffering grave damage from the activities of an unidentified disloyal servant, it is undoubtedly in the interests of justice that he should be able to identify him in order to terminate his contract of employment, notwithstanding that no legal proceedings may be necessary to achieve that end.
Construing the phrase 'in the interests of justice' in this sense immediately emphasises the importance of the balancing exercise. It will not be sufficient, per se, for a party seeking disclosure of a source protected by section 10 to show merely that he will be unable without disclosure to exercise the legal right or avert the threatened legal wrong on which he bases his claim in order to establish the necessity of disclosure. The judge's task will always be to weigh in the scales the importance of enabling the ends of justice to be attained in the circumstances of the particular case on the one hand against the importance of protecting the source on the other hand. In this balancing exercise it is only if the judge is satisfied that disclosure in the interests of justice is of such preponderating importance as to override the statutory privilege against disclosure that the threshold of necessity will be reached."
Lord Bridge of Harwich said: "Whether the necessity of disclosure in this sense is established is certainly a question of fact rather than an issue calling for the exercise of the judge's discretion, but, like many other questions of fact, such as the question whether somebody has acted reasonably in given circumstances, it will call for the exercise of a discriminating and sometimes difficult value judgment. In estimating the weight to be attached to the importance of disclosure in the interests of justice on the one hand and that of protection from disclosure in pursuance of the policy which underlies section 10 on the other hand, many factors will be relevant on both sides of the scale."
Contempt of Court Act 1981 810
1 Cites
1 Citers
Sofroniou v Szgetti Unreported, 25 July 1990; [1991] FCR 332
25 Jul 1990
Neill LJ, McCowan LJ
Contempt of Court
(Federal Court of Australia) The court has a discretion to enforce a breach of an order by committal despite the absence of a formal penal notice. The discretion conferred by RSC.Ord.45 r.7(6) applied not only when there had been no service at all of a copy of the court order but also when there had been no service of the court order "in accordance with this rule" which encompassed a case where the order which had been served did not contain a penal notice.
McCowan LJ said: "Protection is provided for the person against whom it is sought to enforce the order by the words in paragraph (6) 'may be enforced.' (I should add that neither counsel relied on paragraph (7). It is stated to be without prejudice to the court's powers under Order 65, rule 4, which are powers to order substituted service where it appears to the court to be impracticable to serve a document in the manner prescribed. This suggests to me that the dispensing power provided by paragraph (7) is intended to be exercised prospectively)."
Rules of the Supreme Court Order 45 r 796)
1 Citers
D v D (Access: Contempt: Committal); Dempster v Dempster [1991] 2 FLR 34; Independent, 09 November 1990
9 Nov 1990
CA
Contempt of Court
An order granting custody did not require a person to or abstain from a particular act, and could not therefore be the source of a comittal for contempt of it.
1 Citers
