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

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