00:00In a win for the British government, an appeals court has overturned a temporary injunction blocking asylum seekers from being housed at a hotel near London.
00:09Last week, the High Court ruled that dozens of migrants staying at the Bell Hotel would have to leave by mid-September.
00:16But on Friday, the three-person panel said the initial judgment was wrong.
00:21The judge's exercise of discretion in this case was seriously flawed by his erroneous reliance on the, quote, deliberate breach, unquote, as a significant factor in favour of the grant of an interim injunction.
00:38The temporary nature of the injunction.
00:44We emphasise here, as we did at the outset, that the issue for the judge in August was whether to grant a temporary injunction until the trial in October.
00:56The judge appears to have given very little weight to the desirability of preserving the status quo until that point.
01:05The risk of injustice to the residents of the hotel by being dispersed by 12th September, when the trial of the claim was to take place only some six weeks later, seems to have had oddly little resonance with the judge.
01:22In all of the circumstances, we consider on these issues that the judge's approach to the balance of convenience exercise was seriously flawed in principle.
01:39The exercise of his discretion can therefore be reviewed on appeal.
01:44The hotel in Epping has become the epicentre for an issue that's topped the political agenda in recent months, following the sharp rise in the number of asylum seekers reaching Britain on small boats across the English Channel.
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