The fallout from Churchill v Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council [2023] EWCA Civ 1416, [2023] All ER (D) 04 (Dec) continues to scatter, but in an odd way. The UK’s own Ministry of Justice (as reported in ‘Compulsory mediation ruled out for separating couples’, The Law Society Gazette, 26 January 2024) seems not to have read—or at least not to have understood—the judgment in Churchill.
Sir Geoffrey Vos MR defined the issue for the Court of Appeal in Churchill at [1] as ‘whether a court can lawfully order the parties to court proceedings to engage in a non-court-based dispute resolution process, and, if so, in what circumstances it should do so’. After reciting a variety of case law, including European jurisprudence, he concluded at [58] that ‘as a matter of law, the court can lawfully stay existing proceedings for, or order, the parties to engage in a non-court-based dispute resolution process’ (emphasis added). As I read that, Sir Geoffrey’s words summarise simply and elegantly
