£61,000 Trial Victory for Tunisian Leader Over Al Qaeda Slurs

A High Court jury has awarded Sheikh Rashid Ghannouchi, leader of the moderate Tunisian opposition party An Nahda, £61,000 in libel damages following publication of untrue allegations linking him with Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

The offending article, which was published only a matter of weeks after the September 11th atrocities, appeared in the London-based Arabic daily newspaper Al Arab. Proceedings were issued shortly after publication, under Carter-Ruck's "no win, no fee" scheme, by managing partner Cameron Doley.

Al Arab, the longest established of the pan-Arab newspapers, refused to apologise and made strenuous efforts to defend its article. However, it proved unable to present the Court with a shred of evidence in support of its allegations. The newspaper's defence was therefore struck out and judgment entered for Sheikh Ghannouchi on the eve of trial, leaving damages to be assessed by a jury. A four-day hearing then followed, during which Al Arab somewhat unusually sought to persuade the Court that it did not have the large readership across the Arabic-speaking world previously believed and that it was, on the contrary, a small circulation publication whose articles were seen by, at best, a few thousand readers. Given the damages that were awarded, it would appear that the jury found this hard to swallow.

Following the jury's verdict, Mr Justice Gray granted Sheikh Ghannouchi an injunction prohibiting further publication of Al Arab's allegations and ordered the Defendants to pay his costs of the case.

This was the fifth case out of five in which Carter-Ruck has been able to secure a successful outcome for Sheikh Ghannouchi and An Nahda, who have consistently opposed all forms of terrorism and political violence. A sixth case, against leading German newspaper Die Zeit, will be tried in November.

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Summer 2003