LONDON: A British High Court judge has accepted that PMLN leader Nasir Butt did nothing wrong by filming judge Arshad Malik, rejecting a Pakistani TV’s defence.
Butt had secretly filmed Judge Arshad who admitted to having convicted Nawaz Sharif in Azizia Reference for 10 years, contending that he was blackmailed through a video ahead of the 2018 elections and coerced into jailing Nawaz Sharif and Maryam Nawaz at all costs.
In a stunning judgment, Ms Justice Heather Williams rejected the “truth defence” advanced by SAMAA TV UK’s lawyers that Nawaz Sharif’s conviction in Al-Azizia Reference for 10 years was right and based on corruption. The lawyers stated that Judge Arshad Malik was an honest man who blackmailed by Butt to help Nawaz Sharif and that it was in the public interest to report the video scandal.
The judge described this evidence as “manifestly weak and unsustainable defence of truth”, and expressed her annoyance that the defendant persisted with this.
Nasir Butt has so far won three defamation cases against three TV channels in out-of-court settlements. However, this was the first case involving Nawaz Sharif’s conviction, Pakistani politics and Judge Arshad Malik’s video scandal that was contested before an English judge involving a trial and test of the evidence.
Justice Heather Williams has also banned the TV company through an injunction from repeating the same allegations in the UK against Nasir Butt, Nawaz Sharif and Arshad Malik scandal.
In her 36-page judgment, Justice Heather Williams ruled that the broadcast defamed Nasir Butt, rejecting the arguments advanced against Nasir by the TV channel.
The judge ruled: “The defence of truth fails as the defendant has not shown that the defamatory sting of the imputation, namely that the claimant had threatened and tried to bribe a judge, was substantially true. The defence of publication on a matter of public interest fails, as the defendant has not shown that any relevant person believed at the time that publishing the words complained of was in the public interest and in any event if such a belief had been held, it was not a reasonable belief in all the circumstances; and accordingly, the claimant’s claim for libel is established. I award him £35,000 by way of compensatory damages and I will grant an injunction restraining future repetition of the libel.”
When the channel made these allegations on July 11, 2019, its current owner had not taken it over from its former proprietors in the UK. Nasir Butt’s case was against the UK Company not linked with Pakistan Istehkam Party (IPP) leader who now owns SAMAA in the UK and Pakistan.
SAMAA UK had alleged in the UK that Nasir Butt was involved in threatening and bribing the late accountability court judge who had convicted former premier Nawaz Sharif in the assets beyond means case.
During the broadcast, the channel made several allegations against Nawaz Sharif, Nasir Butt and their associates.
Analyst and SAMAA employee Adnan Adil accused Nasir Butt of threatening and intimidating the judge and accused him of conspiring against the judicial system of Pakistan.
He had said: “How these conspiracies are being debunked. The people of Pakistan should know about this conspiracy. Has our court system and state apparatus sold itself out? Can anyone sabotage our systems through conspiracies? The public should know what conspiracy took place. They should know about how these characters were involved. They should receive exemplary punishment for this.”
In his case before the court, SAMAA’s lawyer for SAMAA TV’s former owner relied upon the affidavit by Judge Arshad Malik accusing Nasir Butt of corruption and manipulation of the judiciary in order to help Nawaz Sharif who was in jail when Butt filmed the judge.
The channel told the court about the 2016 Mossack Fonseca leaks - better known as the Panama papers – and the disclosure that Nawaz Sharif and family were in possession of millions of dollars’ worth of properties and companies in the UK.
The channel told the court that Nawaz Sharif was removed as prime minister by the Supreme Court of Pakistan because a finding was made for dishonesty and failure to disclose his interest in employment in the Dubai based Capital FZE and that’s why Mr Sharif was convicted and sentenced.
The channel told the court that Nawaz Sharif’s conviction was right and that by Judge Arshad Malik’s admission, Nasir Butt had made threats of physical harm and intimidation and that Nasir Butt told the judge that he owed Mr Sharif a great deal for avoiding punishment in murder cases that he had committed.
The channel told the court that Nasir Butt, as per Judge Arshad Malik, was willing to go to any extent to assist Mr Sharif in his legal trials.
It also told the court that Nasir Butt should be put to the highest standards of integrity particularly in light of past allegations about his conduct, as he was also on the FIA list, involving criminal threats and corruption allegations.
Nasir Butt’s case was premised on the fact that the court acquitted Nawaz Sharif of charges related to the purchase of four flats in London, but penalised him for being unable to prove the source of income for the ownership of a steel mill in Saudi Arabia for which he was neither the owner nor beneficiary.
Nasir Butt’s lawyer rejected the case of SAMAA UK and told the judge that it was now an established fact that Nawaz Sharif was convicted in these cases through the manipulation of judges by the then establishment in order to rig the election of 2018 and remove Nawaz Sharif from power.
His lawyer told the court that retired Pakistani judges had said the same and ex-premier Imran Khan recently acknowledged that the then army chief Gen (retd) Qamar Javed Bajwa controlled the whole system and ran the show — the allegation Mr Sharif has been making since 2018.
Nasir Butt told the judge that he never believed for a second that Mr Sharif had done anything wrong and in fact all the evidence was supportive of this fact.
He told the judge, “I made the video because I thought it was important to bring to light the innocence of Mr Nawaz …. Judge Malik would never have agreed to being filmed and he would have been uncomfortable if he knew I was filming him. Filming Judge Malik’s confession was of public interest and in the interest of justice. I was exposing one of the biggest stories of injustice and miscarriages of justice.”
Nasir Butt told the court that he arranged the late judge’s meeting with Mr Sharif in Jati Umra where the judge said sorry to Mr Sharif and told him he was left with no choice.
Justice Heather Williams ruled that the defendant had not established that the defamatory imputation that the claimant had threatened and tried to bribe a judge was substantially true and “the defendant did not come close to showing that the claimant had threatened and tried to bribe a judge”.
The judge said it was clear the TV channel’s editorial took no reasonable steps to get a version of Nasir Butt and rejected the arguments put forward by the defendants that they had tried to contact the claimant.
The judge said, “The claimant has established his claim in libel. I accept that the defamatory statement involved a very serious imputation of a kind that went to the heart of the claimant’s integrity as a political figure. I also accept that the damage to his reputation was all the greater given he is a prominent figure in Pakistan and in the Pakistan diaspora community in the United Kingdom. I accept that the imputations were given prominence within the Broadcast, as I have already described. The award must be sufficient to vindicate the claimant’s reputation in circumstances where the defendant persisted with a manifestly weak and unsustainable defence of truth.”
SAMAA UK’s lawyer Barrister Rashid Ahmed and Nasir Butt’s lawyer Barrister David Lemer both relied on the historic defamation judgment in a case between Jang/Geo Editor-in-Chief Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman and ARY Network Ltd in 2016 in the London High Court. That verdict has become a benchmark for the determination of defamatory meaning in the context of Urdu television broadcasts in the UK. They both argued before the judge that this was a case in Urdu language broadcast that set a benchmark in how such cases should be viewed when Urdu language translations are involved.
In determining the meaning in this case as defamatory in December 2021, Saini J had referred to Mir Shakil-ur-Rahman’s case that the meaning of the words complained of was that the claimant threatened and tried to bribe a judge; the words complained of were a statement of fact; and the words complained of defamed the claimant at common law.