Court of Appeal judges have said the law should be changed to stop the 'repugnant' practice of people held on contempt challenging decisions without even submitting to the jurisdiction.
The call for reform came after the former partner of a revered solicitor made an unsuccessful attempt to appeal a contempt order via a video link from an undisclosed location.
In Wood & Anor v Fleming, Lord Justice Arnold cited a 2013 judgment in which Lord Justice Jackson questioned the automatic right of appeal. Jackson had said that if there had been a requirement for permission, this would have been conditional on the appellant attending their hearing in person.
Jackson had added it was ‘repugnant to the proper administration of justice’ that someone could flout court orders, not appear for the committal hearing, avoid serving any prisons sentence imposed and then be able to go to the Court of Appeal ‘whilst enjoying the shelter of some safe haven overseas’.
Some 13 years later, Arnold said in a postscript, reform is this aspect of the law was ‘long overdue’.
The case itself was an appeal by Sophie Fleming, who was in a relationship with late solicitor Brendan Fleming, described in court as a ‘giant of the Birmingham legal community’ who ran a firm (BFL) employing 16 or 17 people. After Fleming's death in 2023 a dispute arose over his estate, which was to be split between his former colleagues and a trust for his six children.
Sophie Fleming had argued that the will was not valid. The court heard that she sent seriously abusive and defamatory messages and threats to the executors and to staff at BFL and posted similar messages on social media and making complaints to regulators and to the police.
Despite a plea from the trial judge His Honour Judge Tindal that he expected the litigation to be conducted in a professional and courteous way, Fleming increased these activities, prompting the court to make an order restraining her from harassing the executors.
In a judgment handed down in August 2024, the judge found allegations of misconduct against the executors unfounded and directed for a committal hearing to be listed that Fleming should attend in person.
She did not attend and the judge granted a final injunction in a protection from harassment claim. But he adjourned issuing a sanction for contempt of court in the hope that this would persuade her to curb the conduct in question. That did not happen and in January this year he sentenced Fleming to seven days imprisonment, suspended for a year, for four breaches of a court order.
During her appeal, Fleming’s solicitors applied to come off the record on the ground that they were ‘professionally embarrassed’. She drafted the grounds of appeal herself, alleging procedural unfairness and saying the court order she had breached was unlawful.
The Court of Appeal dismissed Fleming's appeal as totally without merit and said the judge’s reasoning had been ‘unimpeachable’.
