Anisminic v Foreign Compensation Commission
| Anisminic Ltd v Foreign Compensation Commission. | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Court | House of Lords |
| Decided | 17 December 1968 |
| Citation(s) | [1969] 2 AC 147, [1969] 2 WLR 163 |
| Transcript(s) | BAILII Transcript |
| Court membership | |
| Judge(s) sitting | Lord Reid, Lord Morris of Borth-y-Gest, Lord Pearce, Lord Wilberforce, Lord Pearson |
| Keywords | |
| Judicial review, Ouster clause, Error of law | |
Anisminic Ltd v Foreign Compensation Commission is an important House of Lords decision in the area of English administrative law, establishing in particular that any error of law made by a public body will make its decision a nullity and that a statutory exclusion clause does not deprive the courts from their jurisdiction in judicial review unless it expressly states this.
As a result of the Suez Crisis some mining properties of the appellant Anisminic located in the Sinai peninsula were seized by the Egyptian government before November 1956. The appellants then sold the mining properties to an Egyptian government-owned organisation called TEDO in 1957.
In 1959, a piece of subordinate legislation was passed under the Foreign Compensation Act 1950 to distribute compensation paid by the Egyptian government to the UK government with respect to British properties it had nationalised. The appellants claimed that they were eligible for compensation under this piece of subordinate legislation, which was determined by a tribunal (the respondents in this case) set up under the Foreign Compensation Act 1950.
The tribunal, however, decided that the appellants were not eligible for compensation, because their "successors in title" (TEDO) did not have the British nationality as required under one of the provisions of the subordinate legislation.
There were two important issues on the appeal to the Court of Appeal and later, the House of Lords. The first was straightforward: whether the tribunal had made an error of law in construing the term "successor of title" under the subordinate legislation.
The second issue was more complex and had important implications for the law on judicial review. Even if the tribunal had made an error of law, the House of Lords had to decide whether or not an appellate court had the jurisdiction to intervene in the tribunal's decision. Section 4(4) of the Foreign Compensation Act 1950 stated that:
"The determination by the commission of any application made to them under this Act shall not be called into question in any court of law".
This was a so-called "ouster clause".
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