Day 311 - 06 Dec 96 - Page 38
1 not believe them to be true, but took this line: "I think
2 the rest of it is true. Even within those particular parts
3 there are true parts, and I am going to go ahead....."
4 I will not beat around the bush. Suppose I thought --
5 because it is a matter I have to ponder on -- that
6 Ms. Steel and Mr. Morris did not believe -- suppose
7 I thought that this leaflet quite clearly meant that
8 McDonald's have bought vast tracts of land, and that the
9 argument put forward as to what investments means is
10 nonsense -- not to beat around the bush -- and suppose
11 I thought that the Defendants knew or believed that that
12 was untrue, and suppose I thought that they knew or
13 believed that it was untrue that McDonald's had directly
14 destroyed the rainforest, using lethal poisons, but they
15 thought that what the leaflet went on to say about
16 McDonald's and starvation in the Third World and what the
17 leaflet went on to say under destruction of the rainforest
18 was true, and they thought the rest of the leaflet is
19 true. What are the consequences of that, would you say?
20
21 MR. RAMPTON: If there is merely a thin layer of factual content
22 in the overall statement, which may make a number of
23 different statements, but only a thin layer, which is where
24 a defendant has said to himself: "Well, I am not sure about
25 that, but so much of this is true that I am not going to
26 bother to take it out", then the court might have a
27 difficult problem as to determining dominant motive. But
28 where two or three or four of the most important
29 allegations -- and it is not just destroying vast areas of
30 rainforest, buying up vast tracts of land, and I include
31 causing starvation in the Third World and I include a
32 policy of sacking or getting rid of pro-union workers --
33 where all those things are shown to have either no
34 foundation at any time in history, or the slightest
35 foundation, then the question, in our respectful
36 submission, which the court asks is this: given their
37 beliefs about this, that and the other things, but given
38 also that they included with those honest matters of belief
39 a whole range of serious material for which they have no
40 foundation, am I not driven to the conclusion that their
41 dominant motive for this publication must have been an
42 improper one, because nothing can justify -- in the moral
43 sense, which is what is at issue here really -- nothing
44 under the law at least can justify the inclusion of that
45 kind of unfounded material (assuming they know it is
46 unfounded or they care whether it is founded or not)
47 however strong their beliefs about the other parts of the
48 leaflet.
49
50 I will be quite honest with your Lordship. When I started
51 this case, I asked myself the same sorts of questions --
52 which are really chicken and egg or cart and horse
53 questions -- as your Lordship has been asking. It is only
54 really as the case has developed and one has seen, first of
55 all, how sketchy -- and non-existent in some areas -- how
56 sketchy the defence has been in many areas of the case, and
57 then one has looked at the sort of material that the
58 Defendants have put out between the issue of the writ and
59 the beginning of the trial, and then one has looked at the
60 way in which they have conducted the trial, the occasions
