by Adele Ramos
BELIZE CITY, Wed. Feb. 7, 2007
The ruling party’s newspaper, The Belize Times, and its editor, Andrew Steinhauer, have been cuffed with a $40,000 bill, after the Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that the newspaper had defamed Lois Young, SC, a very prominent attorney who has also become increasingly vocal in recent years on issues of public concern.
Most recently, attorney Young has been providing legal advice to the Commission of Inquiry, which has been probing into the financial dealings of the government-owned, Development Finance Corporation. Government has said that it won’t pay any money to her for providing legal advice to the Commission.
It is against this backdrop, her role in the Association of Concern Belizeans, and her comments on national radio and television, that the ruling administration has picked Lois Young as “fair game” for public criticism.
While the newspaper had mounted the “fair game” argument, however, the court found that the comments the newspaper made about her were defamatory and unwarranted.
Chief Justice, Dr. Abdulai Conteh, awarded Senior Counsel Lois Young $30,000 in damages after he ruled that the Belize Times defamed her in the newspaper with an advertisement published on October 15, 2006, publicly accusing her of being “greedy, hypocritical, and malicious.”
The Chief Justice said that the claimant had complained that the newspaper attacked her for three consecutive weeks after she took a stand at the last annual general meeting for the Belize Telecommunications Limited (BTL), which, the judge said, “caused the defendants to unleash coals of fire on her head.”
On September 25, the Chief Justice himself had issued a stop order, telling BTL directors that the meeting was not to proceed without certain conditions being met, but BTL’s directors proceeded with the meeting nonetheless, claiming that the order had not been properly served.
Young, a shareholder of BTL and its former secretary, attempted to serve the order on BTL’s directors and later walked out of the meeting.
In that week’s edition of The Belize Times, a letter appeared titled “The Deadly Sins of Lois Young-Barrow.” The next week’s publication carried an advertisement, “The web we weave.” The following week, it was an ad captioned in large bold print, “Why is this lady not smiling?” But it was the last advertisement that appears to be the most central point of Young’s claim against The Belize Times.
The ad listed what they claim to be fees the attorney earned from BTL, the Chalillo dam case, the SATIIM case, and the Print Belize case, among other allegations.
In her statement of claim, the attorney told the court that the ads meant and were understood to mean that her fees are unconscionable and extortionate; that she is greedy, hypocritical and malicious; and that she is a money-grabbing attorney, and unethical, unprincipled and amoral. These claims, attorney Young submitted, gravely injured her reputation.
Belize Times editor, Andrew Steinhauer, was listed as the first defendant in the case and the Belize Times Press, the second defendant.
Arguing the case on the newspaper’s behalf, Kareem Musa, son of Prime Minister and PUP leader, Said Musa, mounted a two-prong argument: Firstly, he claimed the defense of justification, and secondly, he claimed fair comment on a matter of public interest. But the Chief Justice said it was not fair criticism, and he cannot fathom what public interest could have been served by the publication.
Rhanae Nunez, who reportedly sits on the editorial board of The Belize Times, testified on the newspaper’s behalf. Nunez said that The Belize Times decided to publish the information about Ms. Young because of her constant bombardment of the airwaves – both radio and television – expressing anti-government sentiment.
The Chief Justice ruled that even if the claimant is one-sided in her activism, the publication is still unjustifiable.
“They seemed to have embarked upon an unmeritorious tit-for-tat against Ms. Young-Barrow, or in the words of Ms. Nunez, they decided to publish the said article/advertisement ‘in response to (her) constant bombardment… But it was a perilous venture in which the defendants, I find, ignored or lost sight of truth and libeled Ms. Young-Barrow in their publication,” C.J. Conteh added.
We tried subsequent to the ruling to get a comment from Prime Minister Musa regarding the ruling and its implications for his party mouthpiece, but we were, curiously, told that he was unavailable until next week, even though he was at his Belize City constituency clinic taking visitors. We have been informed that other media houses have also been trying to get comment from the Prime Minister on the issue—also to no avail.
In her reaction to the CJ’s ruling, attorney Young said, “When I read it, I was happy because it’s exoneration of me in a documented form, and it’s exoneration for me in terms of the actual libel and what transpired at that BTL AGM, because [the CJ] said in the decision at a certain point that I should be praised for the stand I took at the AGM instead of being criticized. That will be on the record for ever and ever…”
“It was, I find, as well, an unwarranted, unfounded and wounding publication prompted, from the evidence, by the commendable and public-spirited position she took concerning an order of the Court at the Annual General Meeting… For this she deserves public praise and not the calumny the defendants in their publication sought unfairly and libelously to heap on her,” said the Chief Justice in his ruling. “Quite why the defendants seem eager to take up cudgels on behalf of BTL, a private company, is a mystery.”
Apart from awarding Lois Young $30,000 in damages, the court also awarded her $10,000 in costs, which goes to her attorney, Dean Barrow, SC, who is also the Leader of the UDP Opposition.
We understand that the court did not set a deadline by which the $40,000 is to be paid, but Young said that they would move to collect her money “as soon as the dust settles.”