Day 070 - 20 Dec 94 - Page 36
1 which, for perfectly good reasons of their own and nothing
2 to do with the issues in the case, they are unwilling to
3 supply because they want to protect the identity of the
4 people who supply them and the welfare of those employees
5 and the securities of the property, the Defendants have to
6 make a case, and they cannot expect the assistance of the
7 Plaintiffs, unless there is some issue to which the
8 application for discovery -- or whatever it might be,
9 interrogatories -- can be said to go. They cannot expect
10 to the cooperation of the Plaintiffs in supplying them with
11 information which, no doubt, they would very much like to
12 have in order to see (and I stress the word "see") whether
13 there is a case which they could make if they had that
14 information. It is up to them to make their case.
15 I anticipate an argument which might be raised in answer to
16 what I have just said.
17
18 So far as the defence to counterclaim is concerned, it is
19 up to us to make a case. If I do not choose to make a
20 positive case in response to the counterclaim that the
21 Defendants knew that every slaughterhouse from which the
22 Plaintiffs take meat was in every respect an ideal
23 establishment, then that is a matter for me. That is not a
24 case which I have made on the pleadings, because my defence
25 to counterclaim is, in effect, this: "What you have said in
26 the leaflet is untrue. Your defence shows that you know
27 that it was untrue, and yet you have persisted in making
28 these allegations", which, as your Lordship has earlier
29 observed, is a mirror image of the main action.
30
31 It comes down to this: the Defendants' fate in this
32 action, to very large extent -- and I leave out of account
33 questions of malice, fair comment and publication --
34 depends on what they can prove. What they are not entitled
35 to do is to take a very large fishing net and seek to trawl
36 the Plaintiffs' documents and knowledge for information
37 which they do not have and never have had.
38
39 For that reason, my Lord, this application is wrong in
40 principle. It is also in the wrong form, but that is
41 beside the point.
42
43 If the Defendants do not know of slaughterhouses or
44 circumstances in slaughterhouses from which the Plaintiffs
45 take their meat which contravene what the Defendants regard
46 as proper conditions for animal welfare, that, I am afraid,
47 is not something in which they can expect the cooperation
48 of the Plaintiffs or the assistance of the court.
49
50 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It would be different if one of your
51 witnesses positively said: "We get some meat from an
52 abattoir in Gloucestershire, and the situation there is as
53 follows."
54
55 MR. RAMPTON: Yes, of course; and by the same token, by
56 precisely the same token, the Defendants have now lit upon
57 a witness who gives evidence about a particular
58 slaughterhouse, of which the Defendants were previously
59 unaware, of which certainly the Plaintiffs have given no
60 discovery (and never would have done), but because they now
