Huntingdon Life Sciences Group Plc & Anor v Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) & Ors

MR JUSTICE PITCHERS: This is an application for an injunction by the first claimant, Huntingdon Life Sciences Group PLC and Huntingdon Life Sciences Limited (hereinafter referred to as HLS) and their managing director, the second claimant, who seeks relief both on his own behalf and on behalf of employees of the first claimant.

The first defendants Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (hereinafter referred to as SHAC) are an organisation whose express purpose it is to close down the first claimant's business. The claimants seek relief against them and all their members and all protestors conducting activities against the claimants. The second and tenth defendants are individuals who can be demonstrated to have played an active role in the activities of SHAC against HLS, and indeed between them have acquired a number of convictions in the criminal courts as a result of that activity. The eleventh and twelfth defendants are organisations sharing the aim of SHAC and on the claimant's case working with them towards the achievement of that aim.

The injunctive relief sought is under section 3 of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. The claimants have two research centres in England; one in Wolley Road Huntingdon, and one at Eye Research Centre, Eye in Suffolk. They employ a total of 1,100 employees. Their business includes the use of laboratory animals for the purpose of research and testing of pharmaceutical and other products.

The statement from the second claimant sets out in detail a campaign of harassment undertaken by the defendants against the claimants carried out over a number of years. A number of individual defendants have been convicted of offences arising out of that campaigning. The second claimant lists in his statement a series of incidents spread over a number of years, including not only physical attacks from time to time, but regular harassment and threats to employees of the complainants, both at their place of work and on occasions at their homes. It is part of the express policy of SHAC to target commercial organisations that do business with HLS; for example, they have targeted their shareholders, their insurance brokers, their auditors and their bankers. Among the various occasions when there has been public disorder, there has been an annual event held in mid April since the year 2000, described by the organisers as the World Day for Lab Animals.

On 27 April 2002, that is to say the last occasion this was held, a large number of demonstrators protested outside the claimant's premises. Groups of protestors visited three addresses of staff, and during the same week there were many harassing phone calls and e mails directed to employees of the first claimants.

The evidence of the second claimant is that during recent months the harassment has become more frequent. For example, during January, there were about 26 visits to the homes of employees during which acid was thrown over cars and front doors, personal alarms were thrown into gardens and windows were broken.

In February or March of this year, SHAC published on their website a list of those they believed to be customers of HLS with encouragement for those reading the website to take action against them. It ended with these words:

Of particular concern to the claimants is the fact that on 19 April, that is to say next Saturday, this year's World Lab Animal Day will take place. Thousands of protesters are expected to come together in Cambridge and thereafter to protest outside the claimant's premises and, it is feared, at the homes of some of the claimant's employees. It is true, of course, that in many cases responsibility cannot be shown to lie with an individual defendant or a particular organisation. However, there is sufficient evidence in the statement of the second claimant and the exhibits that he has attached thereto, to establish an arguable case that each of the individual defendants and organisations has been involved in unlawful activity. There can be no doubt that the individual employees of HLS, and indeed the company itself, need protection from unlawful activity. The question is whether the remedy suggested by the claimants is the appropriate one.

To start with the procedural issues, there is no doubt, as will emerge later in this judgment, that there are some difficult and important issues to be decided in this case. They have importance not merely in the context of this case and the future dealings between HLS and the defendants, but also more widely in other cases where it is said that protest or a threatened protest is(or will become) unlawful. That makes it unfortunate that the proceedings have begun in the way they have. Although this sort of conduct has continued for some time, and its remedy, if available, has existed for some time, this particular application was brought initially ex parte as an emergency application as recently as last week. The urgency was said to be because of the imminence of the day of protest this coming Saturday. However, that day has been known to the claimants for some time.

For those reasons on 9 April Davis J adjourned the hearing of the application for notice to be given. Because of the imminence of the events of 19 April, the notice period was abridged. As a consequence, the matter came before me yesterday, which was the penultimate day of term, a mere five days before the day of protest.

The issues in this case require measured and authoritative determination. It is unfortunate that they have had to be considered at such short notice. It has meant that only three of the defendants are represented, and at short notice so far as they are concerned. The others are out of the country. The defendants complain, not without justification, that they have had insufficient time to marshal all their evidence and arguments. These proceedings are now on notice but only just and, in my judgment, in the event of my granting relief, a full hearing and a return day in the not too distant future is necessary.

I turn now to the merits of the application. The application is brought under the provisions of the Protection from Harassment Act 1997. I read the relevant sections. Section 1: Prohibition of harassment.

Section 2 provides a criminal offence. Section 3, the civil remedy. 3(1):

Subsections 4 and 5 then deal with that application. More relevantly to this case is subsection 6 "Where:

That is an offence which can carry a penalty of up to 5 years imprisonment. This is, therefore, one of those statutes which provides for a civil remedy, but breaches of the injunction obtained in civil proceedings can amount in themselves to a criminal offence.

I turn then to the use of this Act for this sort of application. It is argued by Mr Cragg, on behalf of the defendants whom he represents, that this is an inappropriate use of the Act. He argues that in two different ways. Firstly, it is argued that it is inappropriate to use this Act to seek to protect a corporation, a limited company from harassment. The basis for that argument is, in particular, the case of the DPP v Dziurzynski. That gentleman is, in fact, the sixth defendant in the present application. These of course were quite different proceedings. This was a criminal case the judgment in respect of which was delivered by the Divisional Court and I read from transcript.

The question of whether the Act was designed to criminalise behaviour towards a limited company was the primary issue in that case. Rose LJ in giving his judgment at paragraph 32 said:

Rose LJ then dealt with the Scottish provisions which are slightly different. He continued in paragraph 33:

He then referred to a judgment of Eady J, to which I shall be returning to later in this judgment.

That is clear authority for the proposition that in criminal proceedings the Act is not intended to criminalise behaviour towards a limited company. These are civil proceedings, but in my judgment, on such a fundamental question of interpretation of the Act, there cannot be different interpretations placed on the words for civil purposes, bearing in mind in particular, that breach of the civil injunction leads to criminal proceedings. I therefore do find that the Act is not apt to found an injunction at the suit of the corporations, that is to say the first claimants.

What though of the position of the individuals? It is argued by Mr Cragg that they also are not covered by this Act, where the conduct is of the kind that we are dealing with here. That is to say, mass protest of the kind that is complained of. Mr Cragg prays in aid firstly parts of the judgment of Eady J that were referred to by Rose LJ in the passage that I have just referred to. That was in HLS v Curtin [1997], which in a sense was a fore runner of the present case. In the report of that judgment contained in the Times Law report for 11 December 1997, Eady J said:

Mr Cragg also relies on another judgment at first instance, Tuppen and Singh v Microsoft Corporation, and the transcript of the judgment of Douglas Brown J on 14 July 2000. That was a different sort of case, but there the learned judge looked at the policy behind the Act, because harassment is not defined in the Act, and found that in the course of proceedings in Parliament, it was said by the Home Secretary and the Lord Chancellor that the Bill, as it then was, was directed at the prevention of stalking, anti-social behaviour by neighbours and racial harassment. At page 7 line 12 Douglas Brown J said:

Against that background I consider the position in the present case. Here the express purpose of the defendants is to target individuals at home and at work, to harass not just the company as a whole, but individual employees, including publishing their addresses in order to encourage others to harass them at their homes and their place of work. The conduct and effect of that conduct is, in my judgment, very much like stalking, even though the motives may differ. In my judgment, the Act is apt to cover this sort of conduct in this sort of case, where it is targeted specifically against individuals and the details of the individuals are given so that they may individually be targeted. In my judgment, the Act is apt to cover that.

Accordingly, I have come to the conclusion that it is appropriate so far as the second claimant is concerned that he should make a claim on his own behalf.

He also seeks to bring a claim on behalf of all the employees of the company. I turn now to deal with the question of the parties.

He seeks to bring the claim on behalf of all the employees of the company by invoking the Civil Procedure Rules Part 19(6), which allows for an action to be brought by or on behalf of a group of people. It seems to me that this is an appropriate use of the rule so far as the claimants are concerned. It is argued by the defendants that some of those who would be covered by the claim may have different views, and it is suggested might not wish the protection of the injunction. Leaving aside the improbability that somebody working for the claimants would share the views of the defendants, I have no doubt that all would wish protection from the sort of conduct to which many have been subjected in this case.

There is also the question of the way in which it is sought by the claimants to, in effect, make SHAC as an organisation stand for all those who are protesting in the same cause. I would have no difficulty with their standing for such members as they may be proved to have. The difficulty is that they are not an organisation that has members as such. There is more difficulty, in my judgment, with the proposition that this injunction should apply against anyone demonstrating at all; in other words, showing that they have the same objective as SHAC.

I have been referred by Mr Lawson-Cruttenden, on behalf of the claimants, to Michaels Furrier Limited v Askue TLR 25 June 1983. That concerns similar issues, although quite different organisations, in that it was a case where the defendants were picketing the shops of the plaintiff company who were furriers; their motivation being their opposition to the use of animal fur in clothing industry.

In considering the question of representative rules of the Supreme Court Order 15 Rule 12, which was in some way similar to the present rules, Dunn LJ in giving judgment said this about the question of injunctions biting against those whose identity was not known:

In my judgment, that provides an arguable basis for the complainants to seek to have the defendants drawn as widely as they do in their present application.

The next area where there is opposition to the injunction is its breadth. It is undoubtedly a widely drawn injunction. DPP v Selvanayagam, Mosely and Woodely TLR 23 June 1999 also involved a very widely drawn injunction in terms not at all dissimilar to the present. Although the issue there was a criminal one, and did not involve a close examination of the breadth of the injunction that had been made, and for the breach of which the defendants had been before the court, there was no adverse comment by the Divisional Court on the terms of that injunction.

The injunction sought in this case includes exclusions zones. That is, perhaps, their broadest operation. The lawfulness of exclusion zones was considered in Burris v Azadani 1995 All ER page 802. That was an injunction restraining an individual from harassing or molesting members of his family. The principles of an exclusion zone were considered by the Master of the Rolls, Sir Thomas Bingham as he then was, in his judgment. At page 810 letter J, he said this:

In my judgment, that decision not only makes clear that exclusion zones are lawful, but also provides very useful principles upon which I can proceed today. In considering the width and breadth of the injunction, I also bear in mind that this order will be for short duration, and that its full extent will be carefully considered when the case returns for a full hearing.

Against that background I must perform the necessary balancing act which is always involved in deciding whether to grant an injunction or not. The rights of the defendants that will be restricted by such an injunction are, it need hardly be said, extremely important in a democratic society: the right of free speech and the right of assembly. The rights of the employees that are being interfered with are not trivial, and the way in which they are being interfered with is not in any sense trivial or transient. Their rights are being interfered with in such a way as to make their lives and those of their families a misery. Indeed, that is the express purpose of the action of the defendants.

In my judgment, the evidence produced by the claimants reveals an arguable case by the second claimant against all of the defendants. The imminence of Saturday's event justifies interim relief. In the short term there is a major problem with the rally on Saturday. Again, in my judgment, this justifies the wide terms of the order. I have been told that an order of this kind will be helpful in keeping the rally within lawful bounds, that the police have mechanisms whereby they will be able to communicate the terms of the order to any protestors so that they may know exactly what they can and what they cannot do.

Performing the balancing act as I must, I have come to the clear conclusion that the individual claimants here are entitled to the protection of an interim order, and I shall grant it in the terms that it was asked for as amended following the hearing before Davis J.