Access Blocked by Anti-Bot Protection - Case EWHC/Comm/2026/880 Unavailable
Summary
BAILII has implemented anti-bot protection (Anubis) requiring proof-of-work verification to access its database of England and Wales legal decisions. The specific case EWHC/Comm/2026/880 cannot be accessed through automated or bot-based requests. Users must disable JavaScript-blocking extensions and enable modern JavaScript features to proceed with access.
What changed
BAILII deployed Anubis, a proof-of-work-based anti-bot protection system, to prevent aggressive web scraping by AI companies. The protection uses Hashcash-style proof-of-work that adds computational load for mass scraping while being negligible for individual legitimate users. The actual legal case EWHC/Comm/2026/880 remains inaccessible through automated means.
Legal professionals and researchers attempting to access England and Wales court decisions via automated tools will need to use standard web browsers with JavaScript enabled. This does not affect the underlying legal proceedings but creates a technical barrier for high-volume legal research operations.
What to do next
- Disable JavaScript-blocking extensions such as JShelter for the BAILII domain
- Enable modern JavaScript features in browser settings
Archived snapshot
Apr 16, 2026GovPing captured this document from the original source. If the source has since changed or been removed, this is the text as it existed at that time.
Making sure you're not a bot!
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You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites. This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
Anubis is a compromise. Anubis uses a Proof-of-Work scheme in the vein of Hashcash, a proposed proof-of-work scheme for reducing email spam. The idea is that at individual scales the additional load is ignorable, but at mass scraper levels it adds up and makes scraping much more expensive.
Ultimately, this is a placeholder solution so that more time can be spent on fingerprinting and identifying headless browsers (EG: via how they do font rendering) so that the challenge proof of work page doesn't need to be presented to users that are much more likely to be legitimate.
Please note that Anubis requires the use of modern JavaScript features that plugins like JShelter will disable. Please disable JShelter or other such plugins for this domain.
Related changes
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Source document text, dates, docket IDs, and authority are extracted directly from BAILII.
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