Privy Council rules Crown land in St Helena can be acquired by prescription in Francis case

The Privy Council has ruled that Crown land in St Helena can be acquired through prescription, overturning a Court of Appeal decision and resolving a dispute rooted in land once associated with Napoleon Bonaparte's exile on the island.

In Francis v Attorney General of St Helena [2026] UKPC 32, Lord Reed, giving the judgement of the Board with Lord Burrows, Lady Rose, Lord Snowden and Sir Anthony Smellie, allowed the appellant's appeal and restored the original finding that Crown land is not immune from the island's prescription regime.

The case concerned an application by the appellant, Mr Francis, under the Registered Land Ordinance 1980, seeking to have the Land Register rectified on the basis that he had acquired ownership of a parcel of registered Crown land through fifteen years of peaceable, open and uninterrupted possession. The Crown objected, arguing that its land could not be acquired in this way, and the Registrar of Lands referred the question to the Supreme Court of St Helena as a preliminary issue.

Chief Justice Rupert Jones found no legal barrier to prescription applying to Crown land, holding that neither section 31 of the St Helena Constitution nor section 112 of the Saint Helena Act 1833, which originally vested the island in the Crown, expressly or impliedly excluded it. The Court of Appeal disagreed on the second point, holding that section 159 of the Ordinance, which preserves interests conferred on the Crown by other written law, protected the Crown's title under the 1833 Act from being displaced by prescription.

Before the Board, the central question was whether that savings provision, originally worded to state that nothing in the Ordinance should "prejudice" Crown interests, had the effect the Court of Appeal had found. Counsel for the appellant argued that comparable land registration statutes across other British Overseas Territories, including Turks and Caicos and Anguilla, expressly excluded Crown land from prescription where that outcome was intended, and that St Helena's Ordinance contained no such exclusion. The Crown maintained that its title under the 1833 Act, and separately its constitutional power to dispose of land under section 31, fell within the ordinary wording of the savings provision.

Lord Reed rejected the argument based on section 31, finding that provision concerned only the mechanism by which the Crown disposes of land it holds, not the extent of land vested in it. On section 159, the judgement set out seven reasons why a literal reading favouring the Crown could not be correct, including that it would undermine the core purpose of a Torrens-style registration system designed to make the Register conclusive evidence of title, that it would require difficult historical inquiries into how Crown land was originally acquired given sparse records on the island, and that such an important exclusion would ordinarily be expected to appear expressly within the Ordinance's prescription provisions rather than in a miscellaneous savings clause.

The Board concluded that section 159 should be read as protecting non-registrable Crown interests, such as statutory rights of entry or control over privately held land, rather than the Crown's own ownership interests, which fall within the registration system itself. On that construction, prescription under the Ordinance was found to apply to Crown land generally.

The judgement noted a separate factual dispute between the parties over the historical use of the land itself, linked to New Longwood House and the East India Company era, but found it unnecessary to resolve given the outcome on the statutory question. The matter was remitted to the Registrar for determination in line with the Board's ruling.