The Court of Appeal has refused Piotr Skoczylas leave to issue a further motion seeking a stay of proceedings while the Court of Justice of the European Union considers his application to revise an earlier judgment. It said his separate request to correct an alleged clerical mistake was premature because he had not first sought the respondents’ consent.
The ruling, delivered on 30 January 2023, concerns a proposed motion Skoczylas sought to issue on 6 December 2022. He wanted the court to correct its 5 December 2022 judgment and to stay the proceedings, or any order striking out the case, pending the CJEU’s decision on his revision application in the Dowling case.
In an affidavit, Skoczylas said the court may have made an inadvertent mistake by stating that no High Court stay application appeared to have been made. He said he had applied to the High Court on 16 April 2020 for a stay of execution or proceedings, among other things, until the conclusion of separate proceedings he was bringing in Ireland.
The Court of Appeal said a party seeking correction of a clerical error under Order 28, rule 11, or the court’s inherent jurisdiction, should first write to the other party seeking consent. If consent is given, the registrar can process the correction with the court’s approval. If consent is refused, the matter may be brought by motion on notice or listed by the registrar on notice to the parties. The court said it was premature to permit the proposed motion and directed Skoczylas to contact the relevant solicitor in the Chief State Solicitor’s office.
The court dismissed the proposed stay request in limine. It noted that it had refused a stay on 5 December 2022, and said the new request relied on Skoczylas’s CJEU revision application, made the following day, rather than on the separate Irish proceedings. The court characterised the application as an attempt to find another route to overturn its earlier refusal and ultimately its final judgment of 31 January 2022. It said such attempts to unsettle final decisions were not permitted by the Greendale jurisprudence.
The court also addressed correspondence about filing the motion. It said its 8 December direction that the motion and affidavit be received by the office did not mean the motion had issued. The court’s operative conclusion was that the correction request should follow the consent procedure, while it refused leave to issue a motion for the proposed stay. The ruling does not decide whether the alleged clerical error should be corrected.