Court of Appeal decision on committal for contempt of court

A recent Court of Appeal decision confirms a number of points relating to applications to commit a party for contempt of court, including:

• Costs orders, like other judgment debts, generally cannot be enforced by committal to prison. Payments due under such orders must instead be pursued via the civil courts' various enforcement mechanisms, such as freezing and attachment orders.
• A foreign national who invokes the English court's substantive jurisdiction in order to pursue a claim here thereby also submits to the court's contempt jurisdiction regarding matters incidental to the claim. There is no need in such cases to separately establish jurisdiction for the contempt proceedings or to obtain permission to serve them abroad.
• Although the default rule is that contempt proceedings should be served on a defendant personally, the court may authorise service by an alternative method where there are good reasons to do so.  A court may be particularly open to doing so where, as here, the defendant is suspected of evading service and there is a method of communication likely to be effective in bringing the proceedings to their attention (in this case, email and/or social media).

For more information on the decision (Smith v Kirkegaard [2024] EWCA Civ 698) see this post on our Civil Fraud and Asset Tracing Notes blog.