Mahmood Mansur Eblish v Attorney General

At an application to strike out or obtain reverse summary judgment, pleaded facts are assumed to be provable, but the court may determine a short point of law where the parties have had a fair opportunity to address it.

Psychiatric injury suffered indirectly through injury to others is not necessarily a secondary-victim claim. Where the alleged duty was owed directly to the claimant and its breach is said to have caused the claimant’s injury, the claim may be advanced as one by a primary victim, even though the factual chain involves harm to others. The strict Alcock requirements therefore do not automatically apply.

Physical deprivation of goods is not pure economic loss. Claims involving wrongful states of mind must plead the alleged state of mind and facts supporting the inference. Human-rights proceedings concerning intelligence-service conduct fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.

The claimant alleged that British Security Services supplied his name to Libyan security authorities in 2006, leading to attacks on relatives, the abduction and mistreatment of a friend, and the loss of property. He said that he discovered the relevant facts in 2019 and suffered psychiatric injury.

He advanced claims in negligence, misfeasance in public office, unlawful means, trespass to goods and the person, and under the Human Rights Act 1998. The defendant applied under CPR 3.4(2) and CPR 24.3 to strike out the claim or obtain reverse summary judgment.

The central issues were whether the psychiatric-injury claim was barred by the secondary-victim rules, whether the property claim was pure economic loss or limitation-barred, whether the human-rights claims belonged in the ordinary courts, and whether the remaining torts were adequately pleaded.

1. Disposition. The psychiatric-injury negligence claim was allowed to continue. The property claim could continue only subject to an unless order requiring revised particulars addressing the claim, knowledge and foreseeability. The human-rights claims were struck out as an abuse of process because the Investigatory Powers Tribunal had exclusive jurisdiction. The misfeasance claim was struck out subject to a later opportunity to plead a compliant amended case. The trespass claims were struck out.
2. For CPR 3.4(2)(a), the question was whether the pleaded facts disclosed reasonable grounds. For CPR 24.3, the court considered whether the claim had no realistic prospect of success and whether there was any other compelling reason for trial. The court could decide a short legal issue, but should not conduct a mini-trial.
3. The psychiatric-injury claim was not necessarily a secondary-victim claim. The alleged duty was owed directly to the claimant, and the claimant relied on its breach as causing his injury. The claim could therefore be treated as a potential primary-victim claim. The strict requirements in Paul v Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust, including presence at and direct perception of an accident, did not automatically govern.
4. Physical removal and deprivation of tangible property was physical loss, not pure economic loss. Because the negligence claim also included personal injury, sections 11 and 33 of the Limitation Act 1980 potentially governed the whole claim. The limitation issue could not be finally determined at this stage.
5. Section 65(2)(a) of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000, read with section 7 of the Human Rights Act 1998, assigned exclusive jurisdiction over the relevant human-rights proceedings to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal.
6. Misfeasance required a properly pleaded form of targeted or untargeted malice, including the relevant subjective state of mind and facts supporting its inference. An either/or allegation of intention or recklessness was insufficient. Trespass to goods required the necessary intention, while trespass to the person did not encompass indirect psychiatric injury and was confined to physical assault in the pleaded circumstances.