Day 309 - 03 Dec 96 - Page 59


     
     1        question would be "yes".  It might knock something off the
     2        damages; in the circumstances of the scale of the
     3        allegation and its intensity in this case, not perhaps very
     4        much at all.
     5
     6        The particular circumstances of this case, however,
     7        whatever mitigating effect that evidence might have, as
     8        your Lordship will see when you get my bits on malice and
     9        damages, even though McDonald's is not a human individual,
    10        the mitigating effect of that evidence offered by way of
    11        justification might well, as it were, be obliterated or
    12        extinguished by the additional damage done by the advancing
    13        of that evidence to no avail and to no purpose in open
    14        court.
    15
    16        That is not because it hurts McDonald's feelings but
    17        because it increases the damage to their reputation.
    18        Obviously, that argument would not run if in the end there
    19        was some real substance in the evidence.
    20
    21   MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
    22
    23   MR. RAMPTON:  But looked at -- as one should look at these thing
    24        I would respectfully say -- quite broadly, even if there
    25        were evidence which, as your Lordship will have seen, we do
    26        not believe there is, were there any evidence that this,
    27        that or the other rainforest tree might have been cut down
    28        to make way for McDonald's cows, at some time or another
    29        somewhere in the world, really that withers away to
    30        nothing.  I was going to say to a pile of ash, but that
    31        would not be right; withers away to nothing in comparison
    32        with the scale and the, as I say, intensity of the
    33        allegations made in the leaflet.
    34
    35        This is part of the leaflet, we have always submitted, is
    36        one of the more serious parts.  Both limbs of it; causing
    37        starvation and destroying the rainforest.
    38
    39   MR. JUSTICE BELL:  I also had the same question.  Is this
    40        section defamatory of the Second Plaintiff as well as the
    41        First Plaintiff, do you give the same answer or is it
    42        different?
    43
    44   MR. RAMPTON:  It is not quite the same because although
    45        I believe, or we submit, that the ordinary reader would say
    46        to himself -- it is after all an English publication --
    47        this is where it originated from, this is where most of the
    48        people who saw it will have read it, they will think of the
    49        English company very readily.
    50 
    51        But given the use of the words in the rainforest section 
    52        'US Corporations', I am bound to say I believe that the 
    53        ordinary reader would think first of the US Corporation and
    54        then he would reflect to himself, well, hang on a minute,
    55        are not these people here part of that, surely they must be
    56        getting some of the benefit, at least by way of perhaps
    57        financial assistance but probably in the form of beef and
    58        other things.
    59
    60        And certainly in paper, as he looks about him and sees a

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