Royal Courts of Justice
Strand, London, WC2A 2LL
Before :
The Honourable Mr Justice Keehan
Between :
The Rt. Hon. Steven Lord Lloyd-Bagrationi | Applicant |
- and - | |
The Attorney-General | Respondent |
The Applicant appeared in person
TheRespondent did not have notice of the hearing
Hearing date: 8 July 2026
JUDGMENT
This judgment was handed down remotely on 17 July 2026 by circulation to the parties or their representatives by e-mail and by release to The National Archives.
.............................
This judgment was delivered in private.
The judge has given leave for this version of the judgment to be published.
Mr Justice Keehan :
Introduction
This is an application made on 11 June 2026 by The Rt. Hon. Steven Lord Lloyd-Bagrationi for a number of declarations and orders to be made by the court in respect of the birth and death of his father and the marriage of his parents.
The application was supported by a number of documents filed by the applicant, including his witness statement dated 22 June 2026, a letter from the Foreign Process Section of the King’s Bench Division of the High Court dated 27 May 2026 and an order made by Master Eastman on 27 May 2026. The latter order registered for enforcement purposes in England and Wales a judgment of the Mtskheta Regional Magistrate Court in the Borough of Akhalgori, in the Republic of Georgia given on 17 April 2007.
The matter was listed for a remote hearing on 8 July 2026 which the applicant attended in person. The hearing had been listed without notice to the respondent, The Attorney-General, because the Court wished to consider whether the application had any merit.
In the course of the hearing the applicant confirmed and clarified that he sought:
a declaration in respect of the birth of his father in this jurisdiction;
a declaration of marital status concerning the marriage of his mother and father;
a declaration in respect of the death of his father in Georgia; and
an order in respect of the Registrar General requiring the registration of the facts underlying the above declarations.
Background
The extensive background to this matter is set out in the judgment of HHJ Reardon given on 6 January 2023 and reported as Lloyd-Bagrationi v Lloyd-Bagrationi [2023] EWFC 3 (B) which I respectfully adopt.
Subsequent to the hearing on 8 July 2026 I became aware that this is the fourth application made by the applicant for declarations in respect of the birth and death of his father and his parentage.
The first application was considered by HHJ Hillier sitting in the Family Court at Leeds. On 16 July 2019 she dismissed the applications for want of jurisdiction. An application for permission to appeal this decision was dismissed by Williams J. on 20 November 2020 and was certified to be totally without merit.
The second application was considered by HHJ Reardon sitting in the Family Court at East London and was dismissed by her for want of jurisdiction on 6 January 2023. A subsequent application for permission to appeal this decision was dismissed by Judd J. on the papers and was certified to be totally without merit.
The third application was issued by the applicant in the Family Court at Huddersfield in 2023 but was referred to Judd J. for determination. On 26 July 2023 the application was struck out as an abuse of process pursuant to FPR 2010 r.4.4(1)(a) & (b) and the application was certified to be totally without merit.
In the conclusion of her judgment at paragraphs 19 & 20 Judd J. said:
“In all the circumstances I will order that this application be struck out and certify the application as being totally without merit. I have considered whether to make a civil restraint order. I note that the previous applications were not certified as being totally without merit (although the appeals from the refusals to make the declarations sought were so certified). I do not consider, therefore that there have been two applications for a Declaration of Parentage which have been dismissed as being totally without merit and so do not make a Civil Restraint order now.
Nonetheless if Steven Lord Lloyd-Bagrationi, Kate Lloyd Bagrationi or Gillian Smith-Moorhouse make any further applications to the court it may well be that that application is struck out and an Extended Civil Restraint order made at that point. If they make an application to any court without setting out all the previous cases which concern the parentage of Steven Lord-Lloyd Bagrationi and Kate Lloyd-Bagrationi and/or parenthood of the Right Honourable Lord Stephen Henry Lloyd and/or HRH Kate Erekle Bagrationi as required in Part 4 of the C60 application form they run the risk of being in contempt of court as made clear in the Application itself at the point when the applicants are required to sign the statement of truth at the end.”
No reference was made in the applicant’s application of 11 June 2026 nor in any of his written material including his witness statement of 22 June 2026 to any of the previous applications by the applicant, or to the judgments referred to above, or to the unsuccessful applications for permission to appeal.
Submissions
At the hearing, I made reference to the judgment of HHJ Reardon of 6 January 2023 which the applicant acknowledged, but this reference did not prompt to inform the court of his other previous applications, nor of the previous judgments given, nor of his unsuccessful attempts to appeal two of them.
During the course of the hearing the applicant admitted that there was no evidence that he, his father or his mother had been domiciled or habitually resident in this jurisdiction at any material time for the purposes of his applications.
After the hearing the applicant sent a note to the court to which was appended a document headed ‘Full Text of Oral Submissions Delivered by the Applicant’. In the note the applicant sought to resile from the admissions he had made during the hearing in respect of his father’s domicile. He asserted that his father had been born in England and had a domicile of origin here. He referred to the high bar which had to be crossed to establish that a person had lost their domicile of origin and acquired a new domicile of choice.
However, the assertions made in his note that his father’s presence in Georgia had been very brief and he had never intended to acquire a domicile of choice on Georgia was (a) not based on any evidence presented to the court and (b) was inconsistent with assertions made in the appended document which spoke of his father’s alleged success and fame in single-handedly establishing and running the Department of English Philology at the Tbilisi State University.
The applicant relied very heavily on the Georgian court judgment of April 2007 which had been registered in the King’s Bench Division on 27 May 2026. However, this judgment provided no material evidence of the applicant’s father’s domicile at the date of his marriage or at the date of his death. The judgment of 2007 was made on the application of the applicant and his sister to “establish a juridical fact of legal significance concerning the death of their father”. The court found that the applicant’s father had died on 29 December 1971 in Georgia. The applicant was then just 15 days old.
Analysis
The court has no power to make a statutory declaration of birth.
The court has no power to order or direct the Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages to make any entry onto the respective registers nor to require the Registrar-General to record facts or matters.
The court has the power to make statutory declarations in respect of marital status pursuant to s.55 of the Family Law Act 1986. In respect of deceased persons the court shall have jurisdiction to make a declaration of marital status only if the parties to the marriage or one of them was domiciled in England and Wales at the date of their death or had been habitually resident in England and Wales for the period of one year ending with the date of death: s.55(2)(c)(i) & (ii) of the 1986 Act.
The court has the power to make statutory declarations in respect of presumed death pursuant to s.1 of the Presumption of Death Act 2013. The court shall have jurisdiction to make a declaration of presumed death only if the deceased person was domiciled in England and Wales on the last day he was known to be alive or had been habitually resident in England and Wales for the period of one year ending with that day, or the applicant is domiciled in England and Wales on the day on which the application is made or had been habitually resident in England and Wales for a period of one year ending with that day: s.1(3)(a) & (b) and s.1(3)(c) & 1(4)(a) & (b) of the 2013 Act.
The applicant has admitted and accepted that:
his mother never came to England & Wales, was not domiciled here and had not at any time been habitually resident here;
his father was not habitually resident in England & Wales at the date of his death;
he was not domiciled in England & Wales nor had he been habitually resident here at the time of the application for a declaration of his father’s death.
In the hearing the applicant admitted and accepted that his father was not domiciled in England & Wales at the date of his death. Subsequently, he sought to assert that by virtue of his father’s birth in England he had a domicile of origin here. However, no evidence has been produced by the applicant to establish to the court’s satisfaction that:
his father was born in England; or
that at the date of his death he retained a domicile of origin in England & Wales and/or had not acquired a domicile of choice in Georgia.
The findings made by the court in Georgia in 2007 related to the applicant father’s death. The documentary evidence provided to that court consisted of birth certificates for the applicant and his sister, the birth certificate for his mother, the marriage certificate for his parents and the death certificate for his father. It did not consist of a birth certificate for the applicant’s father nor any evidence to establish his birth in England.
This application is an impermissible challenge to the three previously unsuccessful applications by the applicant to seek declarations in respect of the birth and death of his father and/or in respect of his parentage and his parents’ marriage. I am in no doubt that it constitutes an abuse of process. Pursuant to FPR 2010 r. 4(1)(b) the court may strike out a claim if it is an abuse of the court’s process. Accordingly, I will strike out the applicant’s claim dated 11 June 2026.
Even if I am wrong to do so, I will consider the claim on its merits. The court has no power to grant a declaration of birth in respect of a person and it has not power to order or direct the Registrar-General to make an entry on a register of births, deaths or marriages.
There is no cogent evidence to establish that the court has jurisdiction to make a declaration of marital status in respect of the applicant’s parents’ marriage nor a declaration of death in respect of the applicant’s father: see s.55(2)(c)(i) & (ii) of the 1986 Act and s.1(3)(a) & (b) and s.1(3)(c) & 1(4)(a) & (b) of the 2013 Act.
Conclusion
The applicant’s claim dated 11 June 2026 is struck out.
In any event the court has no jurisdiction to make the orders sought and the claim would have been dismissed.
This is the fourth application brought by the applicant which is totally without merit. Judd J. warned the applicant about the prospect of the court making a Civil Restraint Order if a further unmeritorious application was made by him. I did not raise with the applicant during the hearing the possibility of making a Civil Restraint Order. I will therefore allow the applicant until 4pm on 27 July 2026 to make any written submissions to the court as to why the order should not be made. Any written submissions shall be limited to five pages of A4.