Day 147 - 04 Jul 95 - Page 32
1 MR. RAMPTON: Absolutely. I have no doubt that there is a large
2 section of the Defendants' witnesses which would do exactly
3 that, no doubt with some encouragement from the Defendants
4 themselves. When I said "show", what I meant was that if a
5 witness is to give to evidence to which some part of the
6 recorded proceedings were relevant -- and that is an
7 important qualification -- then the witness could come and
8 read the relevant part of the relevant transcript with the
9 Defendants, and then go away.
10
11 What I am not willing to contemplate is that the Defendants
12 surrender copies of the transcript or read out verbatim
13 chunks to various people over the telephone, because then
14 all that happens is that the recipient of the information
15 writes it down and it goes into one of these libel support
16 campaign news releases, or, I may say -- and I shall come
17 to this much later on in the case in the evidence -- into
18 some more important media outlet, television, which the
19 Defendants have now admitted has been happening.
20
21 My Lord, I need to say this really -- perhaps I do not, but
22 I feel I would like to say it -- I do not believe that the
23 Defendants really think that it is defensible to take
24 verbatim pieces of a transcript and give them out, when
25 they have been taken out of context and are put into a new
26 context of tendentious and suggestive words.
27
28 Anybody who has practised in the field of defamation for as
29 long as I have -- and, indeed, probably anybody else --
30 knows perfectly well that the permitted reporting of court
31 proceedings is confined to that which is fair and accurate;
32 and that involves reporting both sides of any particular
33 issue. If you do not do that, and you are a newspaper or a
34 television company, you expose yourself to a risk of paying
35 damages for libel.
36
37 It is not permissible to extract bits that suit you, dress
38 them up, and say, "Oh, well, that is taken directly from
39 the transcripts", which is what the Defendants have quite
40 evidently been doing.
41
42 My Lord, then the question of notes. There is not much
43 point in my saying that, in fact, having done hundreds of
44 cases over the last 30 years, I have only had, I think,
45 three which had a daily transcript, and one has relied --
46 as, indeed, has the judge -- on the notes which they take
47 while the evidence is being given. That does a take a bit
48 of time to get the knack of. It is hard work, of course,
49 and I know that in some senses the Defendants are resistant
50 to that.
51
52 MR. MORRIS: Can I object? I work very hard, and I object to
53 personal slurs against me.
54
55 MR. RAMPTON: I would say this, that if the Defendants are
56 unwilling to give the undertaking for which we ask and we,
57 therefore, decide that we will stop paying for the
58 transcripts and the disk part of the CaseView, thus leaving
59 CaseView in court but not in a way which can be exploited,
60 we would not withdraw the transcripts or the disk part of
