I beg to move amendment 8, page 8, line 26, leave out from ‘court’ to end of line 28 and insert—
‘(a) is satisfied that it is not reasonably practicable for an action to be brought against the author, editor or publisher; and
(b) there is a prima facia case that the statement complained of is defamatory; and
(c) is satisfied that such person did not know that the statement was defamatory until a claim to that effect was made and did not reasonably believe that there was a good defence to any action brought upon it.’.
In Committee I moved a similar amendment—I think it was amendment 16—which sought to weed out, at an early stage, unnecessary cases coming before the courts involving no defamation. Replying to the debate, the then Minister expressed concern about the requirement for a court to determine at an early stage whether a statement was indeed defamatory. I therefore withdrew the amendment in order to reconsider it. Amendment 8 recasts it, requiring simply that a prima facie case should exist. However, it also incorporates more of the concerns raised by the Booksellers Association which I raised in Committee on 26 June. That debate can be found at column 162 of Hansard, if the Minister wishes to grab her copy and look it up quickly. No, I thought that she would not.
The then Minister gave what I felt, and indeed the Booksellers Association felt, was an unsatisfactory response.
The points made by the Booksellers Association are as follows. First, although section 1 of the Defamation Act 1996 is available to booksellers as a defence, it is very much weaker than the common law defence of innocent dissemination which that section replaced. It has been suggested that section 1 was never intended to do what it has done, and that the problem was inadvertently caused by sloppy drafting. In Committee, the then Minister felt that there were differing views on the section and on whether it was weaker than the common law defence. If that is so, it would be helpful to know who feels that it is not weaker than the Booksellers Association and other observers believe it to be.
Secondly, under section 1 booksellers, and indeed other secondary publishers such as newsagents and distributors, lose that protection if they know, or have reason to believe, that a publication contains any defamatory statement. Under the previous defence of innocent dissemination, a defence would have existed if the bookseller had a reasonable belief that the alleged defamatory material was not libellous, having been assured by his or her own lawyers, or by lawyers for the author or publisher, that one or more of the statutory defences applied.
Thirdly, as a result of the elimination of the innocent dissemination defence, a technique known as the sending of “clogging letters” was adopted. A clogging letter was a letter sent by the claimant’s lawyers to a bookseller warning that unless a publication containing the alleged libel was immediately withdrawn from sale, proceedings
would be started against the bookseller. The bookseller invariably had to remove the publication from his shelves, as he did not have the resources with which to defend himself against litigation without the availability of the innocent dissemination defence. The claimant therefore achieved the withdrawal of the publication whether or not he had a proper case, without having to issue any proceedings against the author or publisher or, indeed, the bookseller. That device has been used by a number of vexatious litigants.
Paragraph (c) of amendment 8 is intended to reinstate the defence of innocent dissemination for booksellers. As they have pointed out, if they cannot rely on other defences and are considered to be an easy target, and if clause 10 does not enable the publisher and the other parties to a publication to mount a challenge, a bookseller wants to be able to at least use other defences.
I do not want to detain the House. That is the crux of what I propose, and I look forward to what the Minister has to say.