The Court of Appeal (Civil Division) has granted Dale Vince permission to appeal against the judgment of Swift J in the High Court ([2025] EWHC 1411 (KB)), which struck out Mr Vince’s claim against Associated Newspapers Limited (“ANL”) on the basis that it constituted an abuse of process.
The appeal concerns the striking out of a second claim brought by Mr Vince against ANL in respect of an article published on 8 June 2023 in Mail+, the digital edition of the Daily Mail, and on 9 June 2023 in the print edition of the Daily Mail.
In granting permission, Warby LJ held that it was arguable that the judge below did not identify with sufficient clarity or precision the grounds on which he concluded that Mr Vince’s claim was an abuse of process, having found no abuse of the Henderson variety. As to ground two, Warby LJ observed that there was room to argue that a court dealing with a data protection claim should not blindly import and apply principles derived from defamation law. He indicated that the Court of Appeal might conclude that the judge below gave too much weight to the defamation principles and the importance of legal coherence, and therefore this, too, provided a basis for granting Mr Vince permission to appeal.
The Order on Permission to Appeal can be found here.