IAN PAISLEY jnr yesterday promised he would fully distribute an election leaflet after his Westminster rival Jim Allister failed in a legal bid to halt its publication.
Mr Allister, the Traditional Unionist Voice leader, was seeking a High Court injunction to restrain circulation of claims about him contained in the pamphlet.
He is to press ahead with libel proceedings against Mr Paisley, who is standing against him for the Democratic Unionist Party in North Antrim. But after a judge ruled a temporary injunction should not be extended, the DUP representative accused his opponent of making a big mistake.
Mr Paisley said: “His major faux pas today has been an attempt to suppress from the public a document which I produced in this election and which I can now freely distribute to all of my electors – all 44,900 of them in North Antrim – which I intend to do, and indeed I intend to get on with it.”
Details of the contentious section of the document cannot be disclosed for legal reasons. Mr Allister’s lawyers had argued the allegations could be crucial in the run-up to the general election. It was claimed the consequences could be “grave” because of the potential impact on the thinking of voters in the constituency.
At one point, Mr Allister, who quit the DUP over the decision to share power with Sinn Féin, gave evidence as part of his attempts to secure an injunction. He told the court of his complete commitment as an MEP since being elected as a Democratic Unionist candidate in 2004, with a 96 per cent attendance record in Europe.
But Mr Paisley’s legal representatives contended the case was about freedom of speech. Mr Justice Gillen, who refused a request for the case to be heard in private, ruled that the injunction application should be denied.
The judge made it clear it was still to be decided whether or not the contentious section of the leaflet was defamatory. He held Mr Paisley’s lawyers were entitled to argue that a heading in the document must be seen in the context of election rhetoric. “In my view electioneering statements should not be perused with all the precision of a jeweller’s scales,” he said.
Mr Justice Gillen concluded: “It is open to argument that the words complained of do not amount to an untrue statement of fact, but are part and parcel of the political opinions that seem to have been the hallmark of the campaign to date between these two candidates.”