| No reasonable grounds to believe:
The next ingredient of the illegal practice as defined in S.65 of the Act, is an in- built defence, which is expressed in two alternatives. It is that the false statement must have been published by the candidate, (a) knowing it to be false, or (b) not knowing or believing it, on reasonable grounds, to be true. It seems to me that, on a proper construction, the word “knowing” in the second alternative is superfluous. Although one can erroneously “believe” something false to be true, one cannot “know” something false to be true. He can only know it to be true if it is true.
Be that as it may, what the instant case turned on was the aspect of “believing” not that of “knowing.” The Petitioner pleaded in the petition, and repeated in the accompanying affidavit, that the 1 s Respondent did not have any reasonable ground for believing the maligned statement, to be true. The Respondent, in his answer to the petition and in his accompanying affidavit, averred that he had made the statement believing it to be true. He stated the grounds which led him to that belief to be
(a) that one Judith Bitwire, a woman with whom the Petitioner had cohabited, and a child born out of that relationship, had both died of AIDS; and
(b) that over time he had seen the Petitioner’s bodily appearance change, to bear obvious strong resemblance to that of other victims of AIDS he had observed in the past.
A death certificate in respect of Judith Bitwire was produced in evidence. It was annexed to an affidavit of Dr. Diana Atwiine of the Joint Clinical Research centre. She deponed that she had signed the death certificate in the ordinary course of her duties at the said centre. The information on the certificate is as follows:
‘JOINT CLINICAL RESEARCH CENTRE
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