The High Court has ordered Michael Waters to pay the legal costs of the respondents after they successfully resisted his judicial review application. The costs award covers two legal teams and includes reserved costs and costs associated with written submissions. If the parties cannot agree the amount, it will be adjudicated under Part 10 of the Legal Services Regulation Act 2015.
The order was made in a supplemental judgment delivered by Mr Justice Garrett Simons on 9 September 2024. It addressed costs only; the judicial review had already been dismissed in a principal judgment on 25 August 2021.
That earlier judgment found the application inadmissible as an abuse of process and out of time. It said the application sought to quash Waters’s 2013 conviction after it had been upheld by the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court had refused leave to appeal. The court also found that the application for leave to seek judicial review, made on 28 September 2020, came almost eight years after the conviction, and that there was no basis to extend time.
In submissions on costs, Waters argued that the respondents’ conduct and the reasonableness of pursuing the case supported resisting a costs order. He also challenged the earlier judgment’s finding that the criminal proceedings had concluded. Justice Simons said a costs application was not an opportunity to reargue the merits of the case; any challenge to the substantive judgment should be pursued by appeal.
The judge also rejected reliance on conduct in the earlier criminal proceedings as a basis to withhold costs in the separate judicial review. He concluded that it had been unreasonable to pursue the judicial review, particularly because the respondents had raised their objections well before the July 2021 hearing.
The court said the respondents were entitled to their costs under the default position in section 169 of the 2015 Act, and that Waters had identified no reason for a different order. It ruled that the award extended to separate legal teams for the Director of Public Prosecutions and the other respondents, finding separate representation reasonable because the complaints against them differed. The costs included reserved costs, the costs of written submissions and supplemental written submissions on costs.