Defamation - Defence of Honest Opinion

Section 20 of the Defamation Act 2009 creates the defence of honest opinion in defamation cases. I've done a very quick case law search and I can't find a decision since the Act where it has been pleaded and I am certainly not aware of such a plea being made.

Essentially I have been thinking about this defence with regard to statements of pure opinion as opposed to those based on facts, implied or explicit, and whether or not such statements can be defamatory.

For example, if I state that person X is a clown and/or a muppet (to use common parlance) are there any implied facts or is it sufficient that I honestly believed that to be the case?

If I said that journalist Y was a poor writer or that his articles were awful is that a matter of opinion (in the latter case perhaps it is a literary critique and falls under a different defence but still) or a matter of fact?

Essentially, if I honestly believe an opinion of mine to be true, can I plead that in a defamation trial so long as there are no implied facts upon which it relies?

Tom Young

The circumstances in which an opinion will be regarded as honestly held are relatively narrow. A defendant must be able to prove that either that the defendant believed in the truth of the opinion at the time of publication or, where the defendant is not the author of the opinion, believed that the author believed it to be true. In addition, if the opinion is one based on allegations of fact, those facts must have been specified in the statement containing the opinion, be facts which would be covered by privilege, or if referred to in the statement, be facts which were known, or might reasonably be expected to have been known, by the persons to whom the statement was published. Finally, it is also necessary to show that the opinion related to a matter of public interest.


This defence will be available to a defendant who can prove that, in the case of a statement consisting of an opinion, the opinion was honestly held.

It has been accepted by the courts that the availability of this type of defence reflects the importance from the point of view of freedom of expression of facilitating free expression of opinions. Article 40. 6. 1. (i), it will be recalled, expressly guarantees “the right of citizens to express freely their convictions and opinions”. The relationship between the common law defence of fair comment and freedom of expression was explained in more detail by Lord Nicholls in Tse Wai Chun Paul v Albert Cheng[2001] EMLR 777.

Brother Psychosis

Kayroo wrote: »

Section 20 of the Defamation Act 2009 creates the defence of honest opinion in defamation cases. I've done a very quick case law search and I can't find a decision since the Act where it has been pleaded and I am certainly not aware of such a plea being made.

i was looking at this earlier in the year and as far as I can tell it hasn't been pleaded yet

Tom Young

I have pleaded it.