12 Anti-Suit Injunctions and European Jurisdictional Law

Subject(s):

Jurisdictional agreements and the common law — Injunctions to restrain proceedings in England and Wales

This chapter studies the relationship between anti-suit injunctions and European law as matters stand pre-Brexit, and on the working assumption that the European jurisdictional instruments will continue to operate in similar form between the UK and the EU states for at least some time after Brexit. A collision between the common law approach to anti-suit injunctions and the rigid jurisdictional rules of the Brussels–Lugano regime was inevitable from the moment of the UK's accession to the Brussels Convention, and its implementation by the Civil Jurisdiction and Judgments Act 1982. The English courts saw no incompatibility between the grant of an anti-suit injunction and the United Kingdom's obligations under the Brussels–Lugano regime, although there was a lack of reasoning as to why this was so.