Day 071 - 11 Jan 95 - Page 22
1 out parts of documents. I cannot remember whether that
2 came into either the All England Reports or the Weekly Law
3 Reports. You can certainly mount an argument on that if
4 you want, but there is authority on it. The way it was
5 left according to my recollection (you might have to
6 refresh my memory of just what the Court of Appeal said)
7 was that a party was entitled to blank out parts of a
8 document which were not deemed by them to be relevant to
9 any issue, and the court would accept that unless there was
10 some ground for believing that they made a wrong decision
11 on the question as to whether the parts blanked out were
12 relevant or not.
13
14 Do you remember me giving you a photocopy of the part I cut
15 out of The Times?
16
17 MS. STEEL: Yes. The previous document that was blanked out by
18 of the Plaintiffs when in fact we did get it was relevant.
19
20 MR. RAMPTON: It was not.
21
22 MR. JUSTICE BELL: It is obvious from Mr. Rampton's rejoinder of
23 that, that there is an argument about whether that was
24 said. I am not now concerned with that. I am concerned
25 with these documents. I do not want to take time over it
26 unnecessarily, but if you are applying for them we had
27 better have a look at the authority and do it in a proper
28 fashion.
29
30 MS. STEEL: To be quite honest, I really cannot see why the
31 Plaintiffs have blanked out these documents. The problem
32 we had before was that we had almost a year of argument
33 about a document that had large sections blanked out and we
34 did not get the full copy until after all the relevant
35 witnesses had left the witness box, which makes our
36 cross-examination extremely difficult and, obviously, makes
37 the presentation of our case difficult.
38
39 MR. JUSTICE BELL: You have got to make your application in the
40 proper form. You may be right if I hear the argument, but
41 I have to hear the argument and you have to refer me to the
42 Court of Appeal authority. I have some recollection of it
43 but I cannot remember just what it said. I probably would
44 not decide it just on The Times report I gave you; I would
45 get a transcript from the Supreme Court Library so I could
46 read the whole of it and remind myself of what the legal
47 position is. You can do that now if you want. It is not
48 something I just decide off the top of my head; it is
49 governed by authority, as I said, including that recent
50 (I think last November) decision of the Court of Appeal.
51
52 I will take the five-minute break now and you can think
53 about where you want to go in relation to that. If you
54 want to make the application, we will have it argued and we
55 will make the decision. You will have to consider whether
56 you think you are legally on a good thing and you will have
57 to consider whether you think it is going to serve a useful
58 purpose as well. If you think the answer to both those
59 questions is yes, then you most get the authority and
60 I will decide as a matter of law whether you are entitled
