Summary

  • In Cloud Innovation Ltd v African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) Ltd, 2021 SCJ 227, the Court found a fatal defect in the authority by which the foreign applicant company was represented and affidavit evidence was offered. It upheld preliminary objection 3(a), did not address the remaining points and set aside the application with costs.
  • The ruling was procedural, not a judgment on the underlying Registration Service Agreement. It did not decide breach, compliance, ownership, leasing, damages, policy validity, routing control or final entitlement to number resources, and it did not authorise any particular registry action.
  • The March restraint had protected Resource Member membership only pending determination of the application. Once the application was set aside, that temporary protection fell with it. This was an operational consequence of the disposition, not a separate merits holding.
  • The episode shows why corporate litigation authority and network continuity require different but coordinated controls: courts must insist on valid representation, while a short cure period and a reversible operating state can prevent a remediable authority defect from causing irreversible resource consequences.

The narrow decision with the wide consequence

The decisive event in 2021 SCJ 227 was not an evaluation of which party had the stronger interpretation of the Registration Service Agreement. It was the Supreme Court of Mauritius deciding whether the applicant company had properly put itself and its evidence before the Court. The Court was acting in its Commercial Division, through the Judge in Chambers, in case SC/COM/WRT/000168/2021. AFRINIC’s counsel conceded that the Court had jurisdiction. The application therefore did not fail because the Commercial Division was said to be the wrong forum.

It failed at an earlier threshold: the company’s chain of authority to litigate and give evidence had not been established in the required form.

That distinction matters because the March restraint and the July disposition operated on different levels. The judgment records that, on 29 March 2021, AFRINIC had been restrained from terminating, suspending or revoking Cloud Innovation’s Resource Member membership pending determination of the application. It also records that the membership had been renewed on 1 January 2021. On 7 July, the Court set aside the application with costs after upholding preliminary objection 3(a). Since the restraint was expressed to last pending determination of that application, its protection could not remain detached from the application that carried it.

The defensible conclusion is that the temporary protection fell when its procedural vehicle was set aside.

That is a consequence, not a hidden contract verdict. The Court did not decide that AFRINIC’s allegation of breach was true. It did not declare Cloud Innovation non-compliant. It did not adjudicate ownership, leasing, damages, policy validity, routing or final resource entitlement. Nor did it direct membership termination, reclamation or any change to registry services. The judgment’s operative wording must bear the weight: the application was set aside with costs. The remaining merits stayed where the Court left them—undecided.

The immediate practical importance came from the bridge between membership and resource administration. AFRINIC’s own Bylaws linked termination of Resource Membership to the return of allocated resources. A temporary restraint protecting membership therefore surrounded more than an abstract label. It preserved a membership-linked operating state whose alteration could have consequences for resource administration and for networks dependent on stable records and services. Yet those consequences do not expand the decision.

They explain why the procedural result mattered without converting it into a ruling about who ultimately held which contractual rights.

The case poses a disciplined governance question: how can a court enforce the basic rule that a company must authorise those who speak and give evidence for it, while the surrounding system avoids making live network continuity turn on a curable defect in an affidavit chain? The answer cannot be to waive authority. It also cannot be to pretend that the authority ruling settled the contract. The sound response is to strengthen both sides of the design: verified litigation authority before filing, and a narrow, reviewable continuity bridge while any remediable defect is cured.