Day 084 - 07 Feb 95 - Page 14
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2 MR. JUSTICE BELL: That side I have already ruled on, have
3 I not? I mean, Mr. Rampton may wish to say something to me
4 about the first part.
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6 MS. STEEL: I would just repeat what I said last week,
7 really. We had to plead the whole of our case and say
8 which bits of the leaflet we were defending and how we were
9 defending them. We still have to do that in court as well,
10 but it seems that the Plaintiffs seem to think that they do
11 not have a similar obligation.
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13 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Just pause a moment. No doubt on a later
14 occasion I will hear Mr. Rampton about that but, so far as
15 I understand it, part of what the Plaintiffs contend is
16 this: Firstly, that in law there is a burden on
17 Defendants, so far as a Plaintiff's claim of defamation is
18 concerned, to justify allegations of fact if they can, that
19 is, to prove the allegation is true. Secondly, the
20 Plaintiffs say that that burden in relation to their claim
21 of defamation being true, if you cannot do that, I am
22 entitled to draw the inference that the allegations of fact
23 are not true, and that you must have always known that you
24 could not prove that they were true, and that that argument
25 is even stronger if there is not even any evidence at all,
26 not just evidence which I do not accept, but not any
27 evidence at all, coming from you supporting the truth of
28 the allegations of fact.
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30 If that is the situation, the Plaintiffs argue, at least in
31 part, I am entitled to draw the inference that what was
32 said in the leaflet (assuming for the purposes of this
33 discussion that it is proved that you participated in its
34 publication) was lies.
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36 What I have tried to say in the past in relation to that is
37 that whether I am prepared to draw any such inference is
38 another matter. I might, for instance, consider that you
39 genuinely believed the allegations of fact to be true
40 because of something you had read or something someone had
41 told you, even though as it turned out when you got to
42 court you had no admissible evidence to prove to me that
43 they were true or that you had insufficient evidence.
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45 But if there is any further argument you want to put on
46 that, then do so or leave it over to argue when we come
47 back to the matter, or wait and hear what, if anything,
48 Mr. Rampton chooses to say on that and then address me
49 further on it.
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51 MS. STEEL: There is the other point about identification of
52 what they are saying is untrue.
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54 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes, I have not dealt with that. You started
55 with that and I have said we will wait and hear what
56 Mr. Rampton said about that. I am merely dealing with what
57 you went on to say when you said: "They cannot say it is
58 untrue because we have not proved it is true" which is an
59 argument which has come up before and which I have ruled
60 upon in much the same terms as I have given ad-lib, as it
