Quantum of damages where a defamation plaintiff has migrated

Sep 13, 2026 Letters

Dear Editor,

A defamation claim is proceeding in Guyana. The narrower legal question courts should confront: what is the quantum of damages — even nominal damages — where the Plaintiff’s own professional reputation, the asset the claim implicitly weighs against, has itself relocated abroad and lapsed at home?

The CCJ, in Lall and National Media and Publishing Co. Ltd. v Ramsahoye [2016] CCJ 18 (AJ), held that defamation damages compensate actual injury to reputation and feelings — they don’t punish, and they don’t flow automatically from a finding of liability. The House of Lords reached the same result in Grobbelaar v News Group Newspapers Ltd. [2002] UKHL 40, restoring a liability verdict but cutting an £85,000 award to a nominal £1 once it was clear the claimant had no protectable reputation left. Liability and quantum are separate inquiries.

Ramsahoye rejected importing award scales from other jurisdictions, holding that reputational harm must reflect the local community where the reputation actually exists. The Privy Council took the same approach from Jamaica in The Gleaner Co. Ltd. v Abrahams [2003] UKPC 55, deferring to the local court’s read of local factors, and from Trinidad in Panday v Gordon [2005] UKPC 36, upholding an award fixed by a court that understood the words’ meaning “in the local context.”

The House of Lords made this the threshold question in Berezovsky v Michaels [2000] 1 WLR 1004: claimants could sue in England only on proof of real, current connections — visits, business ties, named contacts who actually read and reacted to the piece. Mere circulation wasn’t enough; the burden was theirs to show a live reputation in the community they asked the court to vindicate.

In Ramsahoye, the claimant’s case failed for want of proof — no lost patients, no financial loss, no shown decline in standing. Grobbelaar shows how far this runs: a unanimous liability verdict still collapsed to £1 absent a protectable reputation. Trinidad’s CA, in Alexander v Gabriel (30 Nov 2023), cut a $775,000 award as disproportionate to the evidence actually led. Across the region, appellate courts police the gap between liability and a defensible figure.

Suppose the Plaintiff is a professional whose legal standing in Guyana formally lapsed years ago, and who has since been ordinarily resident abroad, drawing a foreign pension, for the statutory majority of each year. On Ramsahoye, Grobbelaar, and Berezovsky, the live question isn’t whether the words were defamatory, but whose reputation — in which community — the award would actually compensate. A reputation that has ended at home and never took root abroad may support no award at all, nominal or otherwise.

This isn’t beyond dispute. The Plaintiff’s family networks, diaspora ties, or retained interests in Guyana could still be argued as a real, protectable reputation — but Berezovsky supplies the template: concrete, current, evidenced connections, not residual sentiment. The point isn’t automatic failure of the claim; it’s that quantum must be proven, not assumed. Readers following this matter should watch not only whether liability is found, but whether the court is required — as the House of Lords, Privy Council, and CCJ have all required — to confront the geography of reputation before fixing quantum.

Regards,

M.S. Zafar, barrister

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CCJ, defamation claim, defamation plaintiff, Letters

One thought on “Quantum of damages where a defamation plaintiff has migrated”

habeeb September 13, 2026 at 1:32 pm

Hope Irfan Ali is reading this… and his mom too.

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