The High Court ordered Bernie Hughes’s immediate release from the Dóchas Centre on 12 March 2015 after finding that the warrant used to detain her for contempt was invalid.
President of the High Court Kearns said the warrant departed from the form required by the Rules of the Superior Courts. Although the sentencing judge’s order was partly punitive and partly coercive, the warrant directed that Hughes be detained for 28 days and did not state that she could seek early release by purging her contempt.
Hughes had been committed after Gilligan J. found on 19 February 2015 that she breached a 5 November 2014 order on 8 and 9 December. That order barred her and others with knowledge of it from approaching within 20 metres of water-meter installation workstations and from obstructing the contractor’s work vehicles. The underlying injunction concerned work by GMC/Sierra Ltd. in Dublin City.
The Article 40 inquiry was ordered on 6 March, after Hughes was detained at the Dóchas Centre. Her application challenged the warrant as the document relied on by the prison governor to justify her detention. The court accepted that it had jurisdiction to examine the detention’s execution, while expressing reluctance to review a decision of a court of coordinate jurisdiction. No appeal had been brought against the contempt finding or sentence, and the parties accepted that the hearing before Gilligan J. had been conducted fairly.
The court also identified omissions in the warrant: it did not state the date of the contempt or conviction, describe the conduct found to be contempt, or identify the court and judge who imposed the sentence. The court rejected a separate argument about whether Gardaí had returned the executed warrant to court, saying that point did not justify release.
Kearns held that the missing opportunity to purge contempt was significant because the committal had a coercive element. The governor had relied on the warrant alone, and the respondent had not sought to join Gilligan J.’s order as a supporting document. The court therefore found the warrant invalid and directed Hughes’s immediate release. The ruling addressed the legal basis for her detention; it did not overturn the underlying contempt finding or sentence.