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

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