Day 309 - 03 Dec 96 - Page 58
1 rainforest, you know what you are doing. That being so,
2 what I might call accidental or incidental or unintended
3 bits and pieces of rainforests clearance which might have
4 taken place as a consequence of McDonald's commercial
5 activities would not fit the bill, would not get past the
6 door -- which is why I say that scale is so important,
7 because if it were happening on a vast scale in order to
8 suit McDonald's needs, then surely they would know about
9 it.
10
11 If I may answer your Lordship's original question directly,
12 if the facts were -- and I find it difficult not to add
13 "but they are not", but anyhow I will not do that -- if
14 the facts were that people were destroying large areas of
15 rainforest in Central and South America either at
16 McDonald's bidding or with McDonald's knowledge in order to
17 supply McDonald's needs for beef or paper, then I would
18 certainly say that the sting of the libel has been proved
19 to be true.
20
21 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes. If one imagined a small country where
22 there is not much grazing but McDonald's want to open a
23 large number of restaurants and get all their patties from
24 beef from cattle which had been grown there, and the
25 inevitable result is that people have to destroy forest to
26 provide the grazing, then it really would not matter a fig
27 that they had not used Agent Orange sprayed from aeroplanes
28 flown by their own employees.
29
30 MR. RAMPTON: I quite agree -- because, inevitably, they would
31 know -----
32
33 MR. JUSTICE BELL: But you say it would have to be on something
34 approaching as direct as that.
35
36 MR. RAMPTON: If Jose Fernandez goes off into the rainforest and
37 clears a patch and then sends a few cows back to Alajuela,
38 or whatever it is, without McDonald's knowledge, one could
39 hardly say it was a justification; but if vast swathes of
40 Costa Rican rainforest in the north were being cleared for
41 cattle for whichever the Company is now, for shipping into
42 Baranca or Alajuela to make patties, why then, it would be
43 a different case, because McDonald's would surely know
44 about that; and, whatever they said, it would not be
45 believed, if that was happening.
46
47 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Following on, I think, along that line of
48 thought, if there were an indirect responsibility by some
49 hamburger connection which does not justify the defamatory
50 meanings, can that be used in mitigation of damages, or do
51 you say, well, really it would be so trivial by comparison,
52 it would not affect it, whatever the theory might be?
53
54 MR. RAMPTON: Can I leap ahead a bit, because that is actually,
55 if I may respectfully say so, quite a difficult question.
56 In an ordinary case, if evidence of bona fide offered in
57 defence of an arguable sting of the words complained of and
58 it fell short of a justification, perhaps, because the
59 scale was too small or the evidence was not as extensive as
60 the defendant had liked, then the answer to your Lordship's
