Excerpts from
Federal Court of Australia, Faruqi v Latham [2018]
FCA 1328, Defamation:
THE COURT ORDERS THAT:
1. The
respondent’s defence dated 23 November 2017 be struck out.
2. The
applicant’s interlocutory application filed 14 December 2017 be otherwise
dismissed.
3. The
respondent’s interlocutory application filed 11 December 2017 be dismissed.
4. The
respondent pay the applicant’s costs of and associated with the interlocutory
applications referred to in orders 2 and 3.
5. The
parties jointly arrange for the matter to be listed for a case management
hearing on the earliest date suitable to the parties and the Court after 28
September 2018……
WIGNEY J:
1. What does the
martyrdom of Christians in the Roman Empire between the reign of the
Emperor Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus and Emperor Flavius
Valerius Aurelius Constantinus Augustus have to do with a defamation action
commenced in Australia in 2017? How could the persecution of
ethnoreligious Huguenots in the French Kingdom during the French Wars of
Religion of the Sixteenth Century be said to rationally affect the assessment
of the probability of a fact in issue in a modern-day defamation action in
which the defamatory imputations are said to be that the applicant knowingly
assists terrorist fanatics who want to kill innocent people in Australia, or
condones the murder of innocent people by Islamic terrorists, or encourages and
facilitates terrorism‽
Could the fact of the segregation and ill-treatment of ethnic Negro people
under the doctrine of Apartheid in South Africa between 1948 and 1991
reasonably be said to be relevant to the defences of justification, contextual
truth, qualified privilege, honest opinion and fair comment pleaded by the
respondent in that defamation action?
2. These and other
equally beguiling questions are raised by the interlocutory applications filed
by the parties in this matter.
Read the full
judgment at https://jade.io/article/602963?at.hl=faruqi+latham
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