Day 309 - 03 Dec 96 - Page 59
1 question would be "yes". It might knock something off the
2 damages; in the circumstances of the scale of the
3 allegation and its intensity in this case, not perhaps very
4 much at all.
5
6 The particular circumstances of this case, however,
7 whatever mitigating effect that evidence might have, as
8 your Lordship will see when you get my bits on malice and
9 damages, even though McDonald's is not a human individual,
10 the mitigating effect of that evidence offered by way of
11 justification might well, as it were, be obliterated or
12 extinguished by the additional damage done by the advancing
13 of that evidence to no avail and to no purpose in open
14 court.
15
16 That is not because it hurts McDonald's feelings but
17 because it increases the damage to their reputation.
18 Obviously, that argument would not run if in the end there
19 was some real substance in the evidence.
20
21 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
22
23 MR. RAMPTON: But looked at -- as one should look at these thing
24 I would respectfully say -- quite broadly, even if there
25 were evidence which, as your Lordship will have seen, we do
26 not believe there is, were there any evidence that this,
27 that or the other rainforest tree might have been cut down
28 to make way for McDonald's cows, at some time or another
29 somewhere in the world, really that withers away to
30 nothing. I was going to say to a pile of ash, but that
31 would not be right; withers away to nothing in comparison
32 with the scale and the, as I say, intensity of the
33 allegations made in the leaflet.
34
35 This is part of the leaflet, we have always submitted, is
36 one of the more serious parts. Both limbs of it; causing
37 starvation and destroying the rainforest.
38
39 MR. JUSTICE BELL: I also had the same question. Is this
40 section defamatory of the Second Plaintiff as well as the
41 First Plaintiff, do you give the same answer or is it
42 different?
43
44 MR. RAMPTON: It is not quite the same because although
45 I believe, or we submit, that the ordinary reader would say
46 to himself -- it is after all an English publication --
47 this is where it originated from, this is where most of the
48 people who saw it will have read it, they will think of the
49 English company very readily.
50
51 But given the use of the words in the rainforest section
52 'US Corporations', I am bound to say I believe that the
53 ordinary reader would think first of the US Corporation and
54 then he would reflect to himself, well, hang on a minute,
55 are not these people here part of that, surely they must be
56 getting some of the benefit, at least by way of perhaps
57 financial assistance but probably in the form of beef and
58 other things.
59
60 And certainly in paper, as he looks about him and sees a
