Mr Justice Julian Knowles
Case No: KB-2024-002210
IN THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICE
KING'S BENCH DIVISION
Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Katharine Holland KC and Jacqueline Lean (instructed by Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner) for the Claimant
The Defendants did not appear and were not represented
Hearing date: 9 July 2024
Approved Judgment
This judgment was handed down remotely at 10:30 on 14 October 2024 by circulation to the parties or their representatives by e-mail and by release to the National Archives.
Introduction
Following a hearing on 9 July 2024 I granted the Claimant's without notice application for a precautionary injunction to restrain anticipated protests at Heathrow Airport (the Airport) by environmental campaigners and others falling within the description of the Defendants on the Order. The Claimant is the owner and operator of the Airport. It says the planned action would amount to trespass and nuisance.
Having read the evidence in advance, and after hearing Ms Holland KC on behalf of the Claimant, I was satisfied it was entitled to the order it was seeking. These are my reasons.
The injunction is the sort of ‘newcomer injunction’ which have been granted by the courts in protest and other cases in recent years. The evolution of this sort of injunction, and the relevant legal principles, were set out by the Supreme Court in Wolverhampton City Counciland others v London Gypsies and Travellers and others [2024] 2 WLR 45. I will refer to this as the Wolverhampton Travellers case.
Recent examples of such injunctions are: Jockey Club Racecourses Ltd v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 1786 (Ch); Exolum Pipeline System Ltd and others v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 1015 (KB); Valero Energy Ltd v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 134 (KB); Multiplex Construction Europe Ltd v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 239 (KB); High Speed 2 (HS2) Limited v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 1277 (KB); and Wolverhampton City Council v Persons Unknown [2024] EWHC 2273 (KB). The legal basis for newcomer injunctions, and the principles which guide whether they should be granted in a particular case, are therefore now firmly established.
A few weeks before the present application I granted a similar application by the operators of London City Airport to restrain the same sort of anticipated conduct which the Claimant fears.
Without notice
The application before me was made without notice. I was satisfied this was appropriate for the following reasons.
Ordinarily, the Claimants would be required to demonstrate that there were ‘good’ (as required by CPR r 25.3(1)) or ‘compelling’ ( Human Rights Act 1998, s 12(2)(b) (if it applies here, a point I will return to) reasons for bringing an application without notice. Those requirements do not technically apply here as they only affect applications brought against parties to proceedings. In the present case, which relates only to Persons Unknown who are newcomers, there is no defendant: Wolverhampton Travellers, [140]–[143]. Nonetheless, I proceeded on the basis that the relevant tests had to be satisfied.
I was and am satisfied that there are good and compelling reasons for the application to have been made without notice.
In particular, the Claimant was justifiably concerned about the severe harm that could result if Persons Unknown were to be notified about this application. As I shall describe, there have been repeated serious threats about the scale and sort of direct action planned, and this will pose a serious risk of physical harm, financially injurious disruption and huge public inconvenience. The damage caused would for the most part be irreparable. There was plainly a risk that would-be protesters would trespass upon the Airport before the application was heard and carry out the threatened direct action, thus partially defeating the purpose of the injunction.
I carefully considered the Convention rights of the Defendants. However, the Airport is private land, and for the reasons I explained in High Speed Two (HS2) Limited v Persons Unknown [2022] EWHC 2360 (KB), [80]–[81], [131], these Convention rights are not therefore engaged. Persons unknown have no right to enter the Airport (save for lawful and permitted purposes) or to protest there. The position is therefore different from injunctions or laws restricting assembly and protest on the highway or public land, where the Convention is engaged: cf Re Abortion Services (Safe Access Zones) (Northern Ireland) Bill [2023] AC 505; Birmingham City Council v Afsar [2019] EWHC 1560 (KB).
Background
The evidence in support of the application principally comes from Jonathan Coen, the Airport's Director of Security, and Akhil Markanday, of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, the Claimant's solicitors. I will refer to their statements as ‘Coen’ and ‘Markanday’ respectively, meaning no discourtesy.
Just Stop Oil (JSO) is one of a number of groups which in recent years have become prominent for staging public protests. Each of these organisations shares a common objective of reducing the rate of climate change and each of them has used acts of civil disobedience to draw attention to the climate crisis and the particular objectives of their organisation.
JSO's website refers to itself as:
“a non-violent civil resistance group demanding the UK Government stop licensing all new oil, gas and coal projects.”
The Airport is Europe's busiest airport. The average number of daily flights exceeds 1,300, with an average of nearly 227,000 passengers daily. It is a designated Critical National Infrastructure site. It is the Claimant's case that it is a clear and obvious target for the planned disruptive action, and, indeed, features in one of the videos on the JSO website promoting the proposed campaign.
Details about the campaign of disruption at airports being organised and/or publicised by the Defendants are set out in Markanday, [14]–[24,] and Coen, [23] – [25]. Examples of recent unlawful actions at airports generally (supporting the Claimant's concerns as to the apprehended actions) and at or directed at the Airport previously are set out in Markanday, [25]–[28], and Coen, [26]–[28].
By way of summary, in March 2024, the Daily Mail reported that environmental activists associated with the JSO campaign were planning a campaign of disruptive action at airports over the summer of 2024, advocating actions such as:
a. Cutting through fences and gluing themselves to runway tarmac;
b. Cycling in circles on runways;
c. Climbing onto planes to prevent them from taking off; and
d. Staging sit-ins at terminals ‘day after day’ to stop passengers getting inside airports.
At the relevant time JSO's own website emphasised that the group plans to target action on airports during the summer of 2024, with recent updates on its fundraising pages stating (inter alia) that ‘We're escalating our campaign this summer to take action at airports’ and ‘We're going so big that we can't even tell you the full plan, but know this – Just Stop Oil will be taking our most radical action yet this summer. We'll be taking action at sites of key importance to the fossil fuel industry; super-polluting airports.’
In June 2024 JSO sent a letter to MPs threatening further action if its demands were not met by a deadline of 12 July 2024. That was three days after the hearing before me. That was plainly an imminent threat.
UK and foreign airports, including Heathrow, have previously been the subject of unlawful trespass or other disruptive actions by environmental activists, including:
a. Two JSO supporters breaching the perimeter fence at Stansted Airport on 20 June 2024, and spraying paint over private jets (Markanday, [25]);
b. Extinction Rebellion activists blocking access to Farnborough Airport on 2 June 2024 (Markanday, [26]);
c. A group affiliated with JSO, called Last Generation, causing disruption at Munich airport on 18 May 2024, including people gluing themselves to the runway (Markanday, [27]);
d. On 27 September 2021, climate change protestors defied a court order and blocked part of the M25 at Heathrow (Coen, [28(a)]);
e. In September 2019, the climate change group, Heathrow Pause, attempted to disrupt flights into and out of the Airport by flying drones in the Airport's exclusion zone (Coen, [27(a)]); and
f. On 13 July 2015, 13 members of the climate change protest group ‘Plane Stupid’ broke through the perimeter fence and onto the northern runway at the Airport. They chained themselves together in protest, disrupting hundreds of flights (Coen [27(c)]).
In the London City Airports case (see above) I also had evidence about protests by environmental activists there in 2019.
I was and am satisfied on all of the Claimant's evidence that there is real threat of disruptive protest to the Airport by environmental protesters. For reasons I will come to, this protest will not be lawful.
I turn to the question of harm.
Risk of harm
I was and am satisfied that the anticipated protest would cause a serious risk of harm; those harms being serious injury and death; financial harm; and unquantifiable inconvenience. I adopt the analysis in [17] et seq of the Claimant's Skeleton Argument and highlight the following.
The Airport is a busy, operational site serving passengers and cargo, with two runways and, as I have said, around 1,300 flight every day. As a Code F compliant airport (an International Civil Aviation Organisation designation), it can receive the...
