Evangelou and Others v McNicol and Others
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 12 August 2016 |
| Court | Court of Appeal (Civil Division) |
| Date | 12 August 2016 |
COURT OF APPEAL PUBLISHED
Before Lord Justice Beatson, Lady Justice Macur and Lord Justice Sales
The National Executive Committee (NEC) of the Labour party had been empowered by the party's Rule Book to define eligibility criteria as to who was entitled to vote in leadership elections. Therefore the NEC had acted within its powers when it passed a resolution which resulted in members who had joined the party after January 12, 2016, becoming ineligible to vote.
The Court of Appeal so held, allowing the appeal of Iain McNicol, general secretary of the Labour party, acting on behalf of all members of the Labour party except the claimants, from a decision of Mr Justice Hickinbottom ([2016] EWHC 2058 (QB)) granting the claimants, Christine Evangelou, the Reverend Edward Mungo Lear, Hannah Fordham, Chris Granger and FM (a child by his litigation friend HW) a declaration that a resolution of the Labour party's NEC on July 12, 2016, that only those who had been members of the party for six continuous months could vote in the forthcoming leadership election, would, if acted upon, be a breach of the party's contract with its members.
Mr Clive Sheldon, QC and Mr Julian Milford for the General Secretary; Mr David Goldstone, QC and Ms Imogen Proud for the claimants.
LORD JUSTICE BEATSON, delivering the judgment of the court, said that the issue was whether the provisions in the Labour party's 2016 Rule Book, which constituted a contract between the individual members, entitled all members to vote in the leadership election unless excluded by another rule, as the claimants maintained.
Or, as the general secretary of the party maintained, the rules only prescribed the general category of persons constituting the electorate and did not provide that all those within the category were necessarily entitled to vote, and the power to determine which members were eligible to vote was vested in the NEC.
The general secretary submitted that Chapter 4, clause II(2)(C)(vii), which stated that the "precise eligibility criteria shall be defined" by the NEC, empowered the NEC to set eligibility criteria for voting in the election which restricted entitlement to vote by reference to a period of continuous party membership commencing before the date when the election process started.
He also submitted that the timetable for the conduct of the leadership elections empowered the NEC to set a "freeze...
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