Summary

  • On 12 November 2021, the Supreme Court of Seychelles granted an interim injunction restraining specified AFRINIC action affecting Cloud Innovation’s membership renewal and use of Internet number resources; on 28 October 2022, Dodin J voided that injunction with immediate effect because Seychelles did not meet the threshold to be the proper forum.
  • The forum analysis turned on a cluster of connections: litigation between the same parties in Mauritius, the agreement’s choice of Mauritian law, the limited Seychelles connection, AFRINIC’s absence of operational activity in Seychelles and the need to enforce effective relief in Mauritius.
  • The judgment did not resolve the contractual merits, res judicata, resource entitlement, routing or leasing conduct, policy validity, damages, or the ultimate validity of any membership termination. The parties made broader allegations and arguments, but the court’s disposition was narrower.
  • The institutional lesson has two sides: sovereign courts decide judicial relief, while AFRINIC remains a private technical bookkeeper and coordinator without sovereign, regulatory, police, punitive, confiscatory or adjudicatory power. Registry implementation should follow the current operative instrument exactly, remain reversible and never become an extra-judicial penalty.

Eleven and a half months separated protection from its immediate removal. The Supreme Court of Seychelles had restrained the African Network Information Centre, AFRINIC, from terminating, suspending or revoking Cloud Innovation’s Resource Membership, refusing to process its 2022 renewal, or interfering with its use of Internet number resources allocated or acquired through that membership. The plaintiff was a Seychelles international business company. The defendant was a Mauritius-incorporated company providing regional Internet registry services.

The practical stake was therefore located at the intersection of a contractual membership relationship, technical records and two national legal settings.

On 28 October 2022, Dodin J held that Seychelles did not meet the threshold to be the proper forum and voided the 12 November 2021 injunction with immediate effect. That is the holding at the centre of Cloud Innovation Ltd v African Network Info. Ltd (CS103/2021) [2022] SCSC 971. AFRINIC’s own case index connects the matter to the label MA 239/2021; the judgment cover and neutral citation use CS103/2021. The identifiers belong together in an accurate account, but they should not be collapsed into one invented designation.

What disappeared was interim relief, not Cloud Innovation’s contract claim by judicial determination. The court did not decide the ultimate validity of membership termination, ownership or entitlement to number resources, the legality of leasing or routing conduct, the validity of AFRINIC policy, or damages. It also expressly said that, after deciding the forum issue, it did not need to consider res judicata. Calling the result a merits victory for AFRINIC, or a merits defeat for Cloud Innovation, would say more than the judgment did.

The reasoning was procedural without being merely technical. Clause 7(a) of the parties’ Resource Services Agreement, as quoted by the court, combined two ideas: each party was required to comply with legal provisions in the jurisdiction where it operated, and the agreement was governed by the laws of the Republic of Mauritius. The court held that Mauritian law governed the agreement and considered it more probable than not that a dispute about the contract should be resolved under that law.

It also treated uncontested litigation between the same parties in Mauritius, and Cloud Innovation’s earlier resort to that forum, as relevant connections.

Seychelles had a connection: Cloud Innovation was registered there and said it operated there. Yet the court regarded registration as the apparent link while the businesses otherwise seemed to be conducted overseas. Office location, in these circumstances, was not enough. AFRINIC had no operational activity in Seychelles, and the court reasoned that an effective injunction against it would have to be enforced in Mauritius.

Governing law, prior conduct, operational location and enforceability therefore converged on the same practical question: could Seychelles provide the proper foundation for relief whose implementation depended on a defendant elsewhere?

Cloud Innovation’s best case deserves to be stated without caricature. The company argued that its Seychelles incorporation and claimed operation supplied a local connection; that the earlier Mauritian proceedings had not finally decided the contractual merits; that the causes of action differed; and that interim protection was needed to preserve claimed contractual rights against interference that could be difficult to reverse. Those were the plaintiff’s submissions, not findings in its favour. They explain why an interim application was intelligible even though the court ultimately rejected Seychelles as the proper forum.

AFRINIC’s wider objections must be handled with the same discipline. AFRINIC raised service, jurisdiction, Mauritian governing law, earlier litigation, non-disclosure, res judicata, forum shopping, abuse of process, forum non conveniens and lis alibi pendens. These were pleaded positions. The judgment’s narrow success for AFRINIC on the proper-forum plea did not transform every objection into a finding. In particular, the court did not hold that service was defective, did not find forum shopping or abuse proved, and did not decide res judicata.

The ruling consequently establishes a limited but important proposition. Cross-border protection over a registry relationship is only as durable as the judicial basis on which it rests. A court may temporarily restrain action while litigation proceeds, yet later conclude that the forum’s links, governing law and enforcement capacity are inadequate. When that happens, relief can disappear immediately even while the contract controversy remains unresolved.

That proposition does not enlarge AFRINIC’s status. NRS’s account of AFRINIC helps locate it as a private, member-based registry whose services and records matter to members. Heng Lu’s analysis supplies the controlling limit: operational importance is not sovereignty. AFRINIC is a technical bookkeeper, service provider and coordinator. It has no legislative, regulatory, police, prosecutorial, punitive, confiscatory or public-law adjudicatory power. A sovereign court’s order carries judicial force; a registry’s response is bounded implementation. The ruling vindicated a forum objection.

It did not crown the successful private party with public authority.