The Court of Ap­peal has up­held a low­er court rul­ing award­ing En­er­gy and En­er­gy In­dus­tries Min­is­ter, Dr. Roodal Mooni­lal, TT$475,000 (One TT dol­lar=US$0.16 cents) in dam­ages over a news­pa­per ar­ti­cle pub­lished in May and June 2016.

In ad­di­tion, the Court of Ap­peal has or­dered free­lance colum­nist Juli­et Davy to pay $69,000 in costs, as well as an ad­di­tion­al TT$46,000 for costs re­lat­ed to the ap­peal.

The ar­ti­cle was pub­lished in the now de­funct T&T Mir­ror news­pa­per in May and June 2016, and ref­er­enced a list cir­cu­lat­ing on so­cial me­dia that claimed Mooni­lal was the fourth-rich­est per­son in the coun­try, with a net worth of TT$2.58 bil­lion. The list was nev­er proven to be re­al, and no ev­i­dence was pre­sent­ed to show Mooni­lal had such wealth.

In 2020, High Court judge, Jus­tice Robin Mo­hammed ruled that the ar­ti­cles were defam­a­to­ry, re­ject­ing the de­fence of fair and hon­est com­ment.

The Ap­peal Court, in up­hold­ing the low­er court rul­ing, said it found that the ar­ti­cles made se­ri­ous claims with­out ev­i­dence and that re­peat­ing an on­line ru­mour with­out ver­i­fy­ing the facts is not re­spon­si­ble jour­nal­ism.

The court al­so found the dam­ages award­ed were rea­son­able.

“The onus of re­spon­si­bil­i­ty lies with jour­nal­ists to ver­i­fy in­for­ma­tion be­fore pub­li­ca­tion,” the Court of Ap­peal ruled.

It added: “Free­dom of speech does not mean free­dom from ac­count­abil­i­ty.”

In de­cid­ing the ap­peal, the judges held that the tri­al judge ap­plied the cor­rect le­gal tests, in­clud­ing the ob­jec­tive “rea­son­able read­er” stan­dard, and was not plain­ly wrong in de­ter­min­ing that the ar­ti­cles, when read in con­text, car­ried defam­a­to­ry mean­ings.

They al­so agreed that the ar­ti­cles gave le­git­i­ma­cy to un­found­ed ru­mours with­out prop­er qual­i­fi­ca­tion or ev­i­dence, while Davy’s fair com­ment de­fence failed be­cause her com­ments were not based on proven facts and there was no ev­i­dence that she be­lieved the al­le­ga­tions to be true.

The judges cau­tioned against re­pub­lish­ing a defam­a­to­ry state­ment—even if cit­ing a ru­mour—main­tain­ing it re­quired proof of the truth of the un­der­ly­ing al­le­ga­tion, and not mere­ly that the ru­mour ex­ist­ed.

In dis­miss­ing the ap­peal, the Court of Ap­peal re­it­er­at­ed the need for re­spon­si­ble pub­lic dis­course, even when talk­ing about pol­i­tics, and that free speech must be bal­anced with re­spect­ing oth­ers’ rep­u­ta­tions. —(CMC)