Wealthy individuals including Russian oligarchs, states and corporations that abuse the legal system to gag journalists and dodge oversight face a European Union-wide crackdown including potential fines.
A proposed law on so-called Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, or SLAPPs, targets “groundless or exaggerated” lawsuits intended to “censor, intimidate and silence” journalists and others, the European Commission announced on Wednesday.
“We promised to defend better journalists and human rights defenders against those that try to silence them,” Vera Jourova, the commission’s vice president for values and transparency, said in a statement. “The new law does that.”
The move follows UK plans to accelerate legal reforms against such strategic lawsuits — dubbed “lawfare” — in part to curb Russian influence in the country. The EU proposal seeks to avoid situations where journalists become targets of legal threats and abusive litigation, as was the case for Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese journalist who investigated political corruption and faced 47 lawsuits when she was assassinated with a car bomb.
The new rules, which still need the backing of the European Parliament and EU nations, would apply in cross-border cases, so where a journalist based in one EU nation is targeted by a lawsuit in another EU nation. The law would also protect people in the EU against abusive lawsuits outside the bloc, by allowing member states to refuse recognizing the validity of such judgments.
Photograph: European Union (EU) flags outside the Berlaymont building in Brussels, Belgium, on Sunday, Dec. 13, 2020. Photo credit: Geert Vanden Wijngaert/Bloomberg
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