The claimants appealed by way of case stated against the decision of the Crown Court to allow an appeal against conviction for six offences of breach of an enforcement notice served on the respondent. The informations charged the respondent (who was an Orthodox Rabbi occupying one half of a semi-detached house in north London as a school and synagogue) with failure to comply with an abatement notice, which required him to ‘immediately cease shouting, chanting and jumping on the internal floors to the property so as not to cause a nuisance to the occupiers of neighbouring properties’. The Crown Court had rejected the evidence of the environmental health officers that the noise that they heard constituted a statutory nuisance and were satisfied that Article 9 of the ECHR was not a bar to criminal proceedings. The Administrative Court was not persuaded that the Crown Court had not been entitled to reach the decision that they had. The Court agreed with the Crown Court's provisional view that, if the service was conducted in such a way that the court found that a statutory nuisance existed, the fact that the nuisance was created in the course of religious worship, in premises registered and with planning permission for that use, would be unlikely to amount to a defence of reasonable excuse nor would a prosecution be disproportionate. [JG]
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