The Rt Hon Steven Lord Lloyd-Bagrationi v The Attorney-General

A family court cannot make a statutory declaration of birth or direct the Registrar-General to enter facts in the birth, death or marriage registers. A declaration of marital status is subject to the jurisdictional conditions in section 55 of the Family Law Act 1986. A declaration of presumed death is subject to the domicile or habitual-residence conditions in section 1 of the Presumption of Death Act 2013. A repeated application that impermissibly reopens previously unsuccessful claims may be struck out as an abuse of process. Without cogent evidence establishing the required jurisdictional connection, the claim fails on its merits.

The applicant made a fourth application for declarations concerning his father’s birth and death and his parents’ marital status, together with an order directed to the Registrar-General. Earlier applications had been dismissed for want of jurisdiction or struck out as an abuse of process. The second application was considered in Lloyd-Bagrationi v Lloyd-Bagrationi [2023] EWFC 3 (B). The present application was listed without notice to the respondent so that the court could consider whether it had merit. The applicant admitted the absence of the relevant domicile and habitual-residence connections, but later sought to resile from part of those admissions. The central issues were whether the court had power and jurisdiction to grant the declarations and whether the repeated application constituted an abuse of process.

1. Disposition. The claim dated 11 June 2026 was struck out. The court held that it was an impermissible challenge to three previous unsuccessful applications concerning the same subject matter and therefore an abuse of process. Under FPR 2010 r 4(1)(b), the court may strike out a claim that is an abuse of the court’s process.
2. The court had no power to make a statutory declaration of a person’s birth. It also had no power to order or direct the Registrar-General to make entries in, or record facts in, the birth, death or marriage registers.
3. Under section 55 of the Family Law Act 1986, the court could 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 death or had been habitually resident there for the one-year period ending with that date.
4. Under section 1 of the Presumption of Death Act 2013, jurisdiction required either the deceased’s domicile in England and Wales on the last day known to be alive or the requisite one-year habitual residence, or the applicant’s domicile or requisite one-year habitual residence at the application date.
5. The applicant accepted that his mother had never been domiciled or habitually resident in England and Wales, that his father was not habitually resident there at death, and that he was neither domiciled nor habitually resident there when he applied. There was no cogent evidence that the father was born in England, retained a domicile of origin there, or had not acquired a domicile of choice in Georgia. The Georgian judgment established the death but did not provide evidence of the father’s birth or domicile. Accordingly, even if the strike-out were wrong, the court lacked jurisdiction and the claim would have been dismissed.
6. The application was the fourth considered totally without merit. The applicant was given until 4 pm on 27 July 2026 to make written submissions explaining why a Civil Restraint Order should not be made, limited to five pages of A4.

This was a first-instance application. The judgment records the following earlier stages in the same dispute:

• Family Court at Leeds: the first application was dismissed for want of jurisdiction on 16 July 2019. Permission to appeal was dismissed by Williams J on 20 November 2020 and certified totally without merit.
• Family Court at East London: the second application was dismissed for want of jurisdiction on 6 January 2023. Permission to appeal was dismissed on the papers and certified totally without merit.
• Family Court at Huddersfield: the third application was struck out as an abuse of process under FPR 2010 r 4.4(1)(a) and (b) on 26 July 2023 and certified totally without merit.

No appeal from the present judgment is stated.