The Supreme Court has overturned a £760,777.68 damages award to Wyeth Medica Ireland over a consignment of contraceptive ingredient destroyed while being handled by DHL at its European sorting hub in Brussels.
AHP Manufacturing B.V., trading as Wyeth Medica Ireland, operated from Newbridge, Co Kildare and manufactured female contraceptive pills. In April 1994, a shipment of Gestodene Micronised worth DM1.8 million was sent from Schering AG in Germany through DHL's Brussels hub for delivery to Ireland.
The package was later found damaged on the ground between two entrances to a sorting building. DHL accepted that it was most likely being moved on the wooden pallet of a forklift and was unsecured. Precisely how it was positioned, how it fell or what struck it was not established.
The High Court had awarded Wyeth the full value of the consignment after finding that DHL's handling was reckless and that the person responsible had the knowledge required by Article 25 of the Warsaw Convention. That provision removes the convention's normal limit on a carrier's liability where damage results from reckless conduct combined with knowledge that damage would probably result.
Mr Justice Fennelly, delivering the Supreme Court judgment, held that the available evidence did not justify those conclusions. The circumstances were sufficient to support negligence, but a finding of recklessness required clearer evidence that someone consciously ran an obvious risk and did not care whether damage resulted.
The court also rejected the High Court's approach to actual knowledge. It held that subjective knowledge could not be established simply by asking what a reasonable person would have known and then shifting an evidential burden to DHL.
A separate argument based on German-language terms referring to gross negligence also failed. Those terms had never been provided to Wyeth and did not form part of its contract with DHL.
The Supreme Court therefore allowed DHL's appeal and substituted an order dismissing Wyeth's claim.