Day 206 - 22 Jan 96 - Page 35
1 of the written statement and the whole of the transcript as
2 read and admitted under the Civil Evidence Act. I am not
3 going to stop you when you come to make your submissions,
4 pointing out and reading to me, if you like, a couple of
5 lines here to say: "That is the evidence in support of
6 this", but there is no point in doing it now.
7
8 MR. MORRIS: Yes. OK. We accept that.
9
10 MR. JUSTICE BELL: So I will make a note. Mr. Stein's written
11 statement and transcribed evidence to the Congressional
12 Committee admitted in whole under the Civil Evidence Act.
13
14 MR. RAMPTON: If your Lordship adds the words "by consent", then
15 that is the only .....
16
17 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Yes.
18
19 MR. MORRIS: Can I just ask, the amendments, are you going to
20 add them to your perfected judgment for the previous ones,
21 or are you going to do a separate judgment?
22
23 MR. JUSTICE BELL: There will be one transcribed ruling of the
24 rulings I have given, two or three rulings, this morning.
25 What I was indicating is that when I perfect, that is,
26 correct the ruling which I gave last Wednesday in relation
27 to the interrogatories, I am going to insert a sentence
28 making the point about certificates of convictions so you
29 have actually got that on the face of the transcript in
30 your hands to remind you.
31
32 It is nearly one o'clock. I will rise now. I have a
33 suggestion about Mr. Ed Rensi, the matter there, that it
34 seems again, whatever the technical arguments may be,
35 premature to deal with that until you have had time to
36 consider the video conference, Mr. Rampton, because what
37 appears to me, having re-read the article, it purports to
38 quote bits from the video conference. So, if we decide
39 what the status is of the video conference, that may deal
40 with the whole matter one way or the other.
41
42 MR. RAMPTON: It may do; indeed, it may. Of course, I am
43 nowhere near being able to say anything about that at the
44 moment, because I am quite a long way from having the
45 opportunity to look at the video tape. But we will put
46 that in hand at once and see what comes out of it.
47
48 My Lord, I will only say this about it, that having re-read
49 the Brinks case at the weekend, I am fairly well satisfied,
50 and would hope to satisfy your Lordship, that one cannot
51 put a Civil Evidence Act notice on a newspaper article
52 unless one is able by one means or another to prove that
53 the statements of fact in the article on which one relies
54 were actually made. In this particular case, the video
55 tape might dispose of that.
56
57 MR. JUSTICE BELL: Right. At some stage, an article went in
58 under the Civil Evidence Act with regard to a Tyson's plant
59 in Arkansas.
60
