The Duke of Sussex’s lawyers have been criticised by a High Court judge for breaching the embargo on a draft ruling in his judicial review against the Home Office.
Mr Justice Swift today described the decision to share the draft judgment with Tim Robinson – a partner at Schillings who specialises in reputation management and is not a qualified lawyer – as ‘entirely unacceptable’.
He was also critical of the duke’s legal team for not reporting the breach to the court before yesterday, asking: ‘Why did it take a week to report this?’
Having handed down his ruling, Swift told the duke’s counsel Shaheed Fatima QC: ‘It seems to me clear that there was a breach of the embargo in this case. The draft judgment should not have been provided to Mr Robinson.’
He said it was an ‘obvious breach of the terms on which the draft judgment was provided’. Referring to the notice at the top of the draft judgment, Swift added: ‘What it says is what it means and it is, or should be, very well known to those who practise in this court.’
He asked Fatima: ‘Why was the breach not reported to me immediately?’ She replied: ‘We were considering whether or not there had been a breach.’
Fatima said the duke’s legal team had been considering ‘Mr Robinson’s status’, prompting Swift to ask: ‘Are you saying that you did not consider that there had been a breach until yesterday?’
She said yes and added that ‘we do not think there has been a breach’, to which Swift said: ‘Well, let me disabuse you of that – there has been a breach.’
Swift told Fatima that the breach was ‘entirely unacceptable’, adding: ‘It is also unacceptable that you have come here without an apology to the court.’
Fatima said she was ‘very sorry for the fact that I did not think fully before those emails were sent and I did not contact the court sooner’.
Swift pressed her on whether she accepted there had been a breach, to which she replied: ‘Yes, I would accept that in the light of your lordship’s findings.’
The judge told her that ‘this is not doing you any good’, adding that her words of apology were not ‘well chosen’.
Earlier this week, Keith Oliver – a partner at Peters & Peters – apologised to the Court of Appeal for breaching the embargo on a draft judgment by sending the result to a ‘social’ WhatsApp group containing dozens of international lawyers.
Lady Justice Carr said that incident confirmed the observations of the master of the rolls Sir Geoffrey Vos in a separate case involving Matrix Chambers that ‘violations of court embargoes on publicising either the content or the substance of draft judgments have been becoming more frequent’.
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