The Court of Appeal held that a plaintiff's inability to identify the alleged perpetrators of historical child sexual abuse does not, in an institutional setting, constitute an exceptional circumstance justifying a permanent stay of proceedings. The defendant's inability to join a third party (the religious order to which the unidentified priests belonged) was held to be irrelevant to the fairness of the trial between plaintiff and defendant. The Court found that the defendant retained sufficient evidentiary material to adequately defend the action — including testimony from surviving Sisters who denied the abuse, material to test the plaintiff's credibility, and the plaintiff's own concession that her claim would fail if she could not prove the abuse occurred in the nuns' quarters — such that the trial would not fall below the irreducible minimum standards of fairness.
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