THE HON. MRS JUSTICE TIPPLES
Approved judgment
Greenstein v Campaign Against Antisemitism
[2020] EWHC 2951 (QB)
50. The allegation of malice at paragraph 26 is in the following terms:
“26. … the defendant was actuated by an irrelevant, spiteful or improper
malice which was the dominant purpose for the publication. Whilst the
defamatory article is unattributed and the defendant has not disclosed the
author(s), if required to specify a person for the purposes of section 8(5),
Rehabilitation Offenders Act 1974, the claimant identifies the defendant’s
chief executive, Mr Falter;
PARTICULARS
(1) The defendant’s motive was to smear the claimant as a criminal.
(2) The claimant’s convictions were for summary-only offences. They were
over thirty-years-old. The current period of rehabilitation under section 5
of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 is 12 months from the date of
conviction. For decades the claimant has been a rehabilitated person
within the meaning of section 4 of the Act who was to be treated as
though he had “not committed or been charged with or prosecuted for or
convicted of or sentenced for the offence or offences which were the
subject of that conviction”.
(3) These historic, spent convictions were part of the claimant’s private life.
(4) The defendant did not refer to the fact that these convictions were spent
or that the claimant was protected by the provisions of the Rehabilitation
of Offenders Act 1974. The defendant can be taken to have known about
these provisions and deliberately ignored them. It proclaims its legal
activism concerning the criminal law at paragraph 1.13 of the article as
well as at paragraph 13.3 of the amended defence.
(5) Moreover, its reference to the claimant’s historic and spent convictions at
paragraph 1.11 of the article was gratuitous and irrelevant to the subject
matter of the article. It was followed by an equally gratuitous and
irrelevant smear suggesting he was a misogynist. The defendant’s
dominant purpose was character assassination.
(6) The defendant has falsely claimed at paragraph 15.3 of its amended
defence that the claimant was accusing it of lying and denying that he
was an anti-semite. The claimant did neither. The allegations of both
lying and anti-semitism were levelled by the defendant against him,
without any advance warning, for the first time in its article.
(7) The claimant repeats paragraph 22 above.”
51. The claimant submits that his malice plea is properly pleaded and particularised in
paragraph 26 of the amended reply.
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