Ogunkami v Chia: Court of Appeal confirms limits on global damages in English defamation claims

The Court of Appeal has dismissed a libel claimant's appeal against a £25,000 damages award, confirming that English courts will not compensate for reputational harm sustained abroad unless the claim has been properly pleaded and the double actionability rule satisfied. The judgement, handed down on 13 May 2026 in Idowu Ogunkami v Cynthia Chia [2026] EWCA Civ 588, has significant implications for defamation claims involving claimants whose reputations are primarily located outside England and Wales.

Background

The underlying claim arose from a campaign of harassment and libel conducted by the respondent, Ms Chia, against the appellant over a period of some six years. She posted 22 messages on Instagram and Twitter containing serious false allegations of rape, drugging and tampering with evidence. The appellant, who lived and worked in Dubai, obtained default judgement after Ms Chia failed to engage with the proceedings. A remedies hearing before Susie Alegre, sitting as Deputy High Court Judge, resulted in a global award of £25,000 covering both harassment and libel, together with injunctive relief.

The appellant challenged the award on the basis that the judge had improperly confined her assessment to harm within England and Wales, thereby producing an artificially low figure.

The double actionability rule

Lord Justice Warby, giving the lead judgement with which Lord Justices Arnold and Peter Jackson agreed, identified the double actionability rule as central to the appeal's failure. Under this rule, affirmed in Boys v Chaplin [1971] AC 356 and preserved for defamation when general tort choice-of-law rules were reformed in 1995, a claim for defamation in respect of foreign publication must be actionable both under English law and under the law of the place of publication.

The court confirmed the procedural consequences flowing from that rule. A claimant wishing to recover for harm abroad must plead each foreign jurisdiction as a separate cause of action, assert that publication there is actionable under local law, and, where relying on the presumption of similarity between English and foreign law, do so expressly so that the burden of disproving similarity passes to the defendant.

None of this had been done. The Amended Particulars of Claim contained no allegation of foreign publication, no averment about foreign law and no reliance on the presumption of similarity. Warby LJ held that the appellant had therefore never established a right to recover damages for publication outside England and Wales. The judge below had in fact been generous in even considering foreign publication at all.

Jurisdiction distinguished from entitlement

The court drew a sharp distinction between the court's undoubted jurisdiction to hear claims involving foreign publication, and the claimant's entitlement to succeed on such claims. Ms Chia was domiciled in England, had been validly served and had not contested jurisdiction. There was no difficulty in establishing that the courts of England and Wales could hear the matter. The real question was whether the appellant had made out the legal and factual basis entitling him to compensation for harm suffered abroad. He had not.

Arguments based on the CJEU decision in Shevill v Presse Alliance SA [1995] 2 AC 18 and the Brussels Convention were dismissed as inapplicable, the Brussels regime having ceased to apply in the United Kingdom to proceedings brought after 31 December 2020.

Late application to amend refused

In a further development, the appellant applied two clear days before the appeal hearing for permission to re-amend his Particulars of Claim to include express references to global harm. The application had not been served on Ms Chia, who was by that stage in custody. Warby LJ refused it on multiple grounds: the unexplained and inexcusable lateness, the absence of service, the risk of depriving Ms Chia of an accrued limitation defence through the doctrine of relation back, and the inadequacy of the proposed amendment itself, which asserted harm in Dubai without alleging publication there and contained no averment of publication or reputational harm in any other foreign jurisdiction.

Practical significance

The judgement reinforces that where a libel claimant's reputation is primarily located abroad, the damages recoverable in English proceedings will reflect only the harm within the jurisdiction, unless pleadings are properly framed from the outset to capture the full global picture. The court left open the question of whether proof of foreign publication additionally requires satisfaction of the serious harm threshold under section 1 of the Defamation Act 2013, noting that the point has not yet been litigated.

The suggestion that modern internet communications render the double actionability rule impracticable and ripe for abandonment was firmly rejected. Warby LJ observed that claimants routinely present cogent evidence of the reach and impact of online publication and that technology may in fact make such proof easier, not harder.