The High Court has refused an applicant’s request to amend a judgment granting him leave to challenge the refusal of an anonymisation order in related criminal proceedings. The court said the earlier judgment would remain unchanged and listed the judicial review proceedings for mention on 27 March 2023.
Mr Justice Garrett Simons said the applicant had emailed the registrar after the leave judgment was delivered, asking for more detail on three parts of its reasoning. The judge said a first-instance court may revisit its own written judgment before the resulting order is finalised, but only where exceptional circumstances or strong reasons justify doing so. A dissatisfied party would normally be expected to appeal.
The applicant argued that a rule discouraging the naming of judges in judicial review proceedings conflicted with open justice and judicial accountability. The judge said the earlier judgment had not ruled on the rule’s validity because the applicant had not challenged it in his statement of grounds or named the relevant rules committee or minister as respondents. The applicant could seek to amend his grounds and apply for leave to bring such a challenge, the judge said.
The applicant also repeated arguments concerning his minor children, whom he was contemplating calling as witnesses in the criminal prosecution. He had said refusal of an anonymisation order infringed his ability to prepare his defence and conflicted with an EU directive. The judge said those points belonged at the substantive judicial review hearing. Leave had already been granted to challenge the decision not to make an anonymisation order; the leave-stage question was whether the grounds were arguable, not whether they should be decided in detail.
The third requested amendment concerned interim relief. The applicant had sought an ex parte mandatory order directing the District Court to issue an anonymisation order. In the leave judgment, the High Court declined that relief, finding it went beyond what could reasonably be granted without hearing the other side and would effectively provide the main relief sought in the judicial review. Instead, it stayed the District Court prosecution pending determination of the judicial review or further order.
The applicant argued that the alleged offences dated from August 2019 and that further delay would deny justice. Mr Justice Simons said this repeated a point made at the original ex parte hearing and did not justify reopening the judgment. He added that any prosecutorial delay did not remove the respondent’s right to be heard before an interim order effectively disposing of the judicial review was made.
The court’s decision addressed only the request to revisit the leave judgment. It did not determine the substantive judicial review challenge to the refusal of anonymisation.