The High Court has allowed an appeal against a decision of the Victorian Court of Appeal on the enforcement of Australian judgments overseas in the context of bankruptcy. Section 15(2) of the Foreign Judgments Act 1991 (Cth), which lays out the procedure for an Australian court to issue a certified copy of a judgment for the purposes of enforcement in a foreign court, provides that a judgment creditor cannot make an application until the expiration of any ‘stay of enforcement’. Section 58(3) of the Bankruptcy Act 1966 (Cth) provides that when a debtor has become bankrupt ‘it is not competent for a creditor  to enforce any remedy against the person’.

Following a long-running family dispute over properties in then Czechoslovakia that were expropriated by the Communist regime, the VSC held in 2009 that one sibling had reneged on an agreement with the others to Continue reading →

The High Court has allowed a demurrer and dismissed proceedings in relation to a challenge to the constitutional validity of ss 189 and 196 of the Migration Act 1958 (Cth). The plaintiffs, Iranian asylum seekers detained on Nauru since 2014, were brough to Australia under s 198B for the ‘temporary purpose’ of medical treatment on mainland Australia. While in Australia, they contended that there was no lawful basis for their detention while temporarily in Australia, arguing that a non-citizen brought to Australia for a temporary purpose cannot be detained under ss 189 and 196, because that detention would constitute an invalid exercise of federal judicial power by the Executive. Continue reading →