The High Court has ruled that a judicial review brought in the name of an anonymised child was moot because the passport dispute behind it had already been resolved. It declined to decide whether the Courts Service had acted unlawfully by refusing to accept an application to the District Court.
The case concerned an attempted application in June 2008 by the child’s mother, acting on legal advice, for the surrender of his Estonian passport. She feared the child’s father, an Estonian national living in Ireland, intended to take him out of the jurisdiction without her consent. The father was named as respondent to the proposed District Court application, but the faxed document had not been served on him.
On 20 June, the District Court Registrar advised the mother’s representatives that the application would not be heard because no summons had issued and the District Court Rules did not provide for an ex parte application under the Guardianship of Infants Act 1964. That day, the High Court granted an interim injunction restraining the father from removing the child. On 28 July, it made the injunction permanent and the passport was returned to the mother, on her undertaking not to leave the jurisdiction with the child without the father’s consent.
The child then sought judicial review, with leave granted in August 2008. The requested declarations alleged that the refusal breached constitutional and other rights and challenged the District Court Rules as lacking a procedure for an application to surrender an infant’s passport. Those allegations were not decided in this judgment.
Justice Clarke said the child had obtained through the High Court the practical relief sought in the original passport application. There was no evidence that a similar situation was likely to arise again, and the possibility of recurrence alone did not justify deciding an otherwise academic dispute. The judge also found the issue was capable of timely review if challenged while still live.
The court accepted the Courts Service and State respondents’ argument that the proceedings were moot and found no special circumstances to depart from the general rule against hearing moot cases. It gave reasons for that conclusion; it did not determine the underlying legality of the District Court office’s response or grant the declarations sought.