Monday, 29th October 2001

1. LORD JUSTICE SCHIEMANN: This is an application by Mr Arora for permission to appeal an order made by the Divisional Court, consisting of Brooke LJ and Silber J, on 23rd July 2001. The order was made under section 42 of the Supreme Court Act 1981. The High Court was satisfied that Mr Arora had habitually and persistently, and without any reasonable grounds, instituted vexatious civil proceedings and made vexatious applications in civil proceedings; and so they made a civil proceedings order limited for a period of 12 years.

2. Mr Arora appeals on a number of points. One is that the cases referred to in the judgment below are only some of the cases in which he has been involved. He has been involved in others and, as I assume, he was successful in those others, and the Attorney-General has concentrated on the ones where he has lost rather than the ones where he has won. That may very well be so. He submits that there has been discrimination against him on the part of the judiciary because of his non-English origins. He says that the Human Rights Act is now in force; that Sir William Macpherson in his well-known report following the Lawrence Inquiry has identified institutional racism as a problem in the police force and he says the judiciary has exactly the same problem.

3. He was asked by me to take me to those passages in the judgment of the court below to which he specifically objected, and he very sensibly immediately concentrated on paragraph 3 of the judgment, which refers to the very well-known case in this field, Attorney-General v Jones [1990] 1 WLR at 859. That was a case in which, as the court below pointed out, Lord Donaldson, MR, made it clear that a court was not, on an application under section 42, concerned with the merits or otherwise of the various points taken in the proceedings on which the Attorney-General relies. Mr Arora rightly spots that this is his great difficulty in this case, because he says there has been a series of injustices done to him in a series of cases cumulatively which have resulted in racial prejudice against him. He submits that this court can now overrule the doctrine in Attorney-General v Jones by reason of the coming into force of the Human Rights Act.

4. For my part, so far as the Human Rights Act is concerned, I do not see of this having any bearing on the doctrine in Attorney-General v Jones. There is nothing in the Act which is incompatible with the doctrines there pronounced. There is a separate point as to whether or no some of the provisions in the Human Rights Act might have had some application to some of the cases upon which the Attorney-General relies. We have not investigated the details of that in the course of this relatively short application, for the obvious reason that the Human Rights Act was not then in force; so it does not seem to me that the Human Rights Act, or indeed Sir William Macpherson's report, carry the matter very much further.

5. There is a second point, which is broad and different. Mr Arora says that his terms of business are such that he includes in them an arbitration clause. He says in those circumstances there is no reason to suppose that he will go near the courts in the future, and in those circumstances there is no advantage in making an order of the present kind; it has the disadvantage from his point of view that it is not a very nice thing to have a civil proceedings order made against you; it does not show you in a good light. I can entirely see what he says about that. He talks about being punished. That is putting it a bit high because no punishment is inflicted by the making of a civil proceedings order. All that it means is that before starting any proceedings he must have the permission of a High Court Judge. But he has the right to put his case in front of a High Court Judge with a view to getting that permission; and experience shows that sometimes High Court judges do give permission for the bringing of proceedings by someone who has been declared a vexatious litigant.

6. The judgment under appeal goes through a variety of cases, applications which go into last year and which I do not intend to go through again because it serves no useful purpose. Having done so the court pointed out that at times the Court of Appeal has allowed Mr Arora's appeals and directed that matters should be retried and they record that on one occasion Mr Arora showed them a judgment in his favour following such an order for a retrial.

7. The matters which have been argued in front of us were argued in the court below and the court below directed itself that it had to determine whether the Attorney-General had made out his complaint, bearing in mind the high standard of proof required of him; that is complaint as to past conduct. The court below took the view that it was satisfied that the conduct of Mr Arora which it had described in the judgment can properly be stigmatised in the language of section 42. For my part, I consider there is no reasonable prospect of upsetting that part of the judgment of the court below.

8. There then comes the second point as to whether in its discretion the court was right to make a civil proceedings order, albeit one limited in time. That is very much a matter for the discretion of the court below and this court will not interfere unless the answer to which the court below came to is manifestly wrong. In my judgment it is not manifestly wrong, and indeed there is no reason to suppose that it is wrong at all.

9. In those circumstances this application is refused.

(Application refused; no order for costs).