We don’t want to be sued into silence

99 organisations have signed a call on the EU to ensure that those with a watchdog role are protected from gag lawsuits, so called SLAPP.

One hot spring afternoon in Malta, a journalist drove up to her house to find a court marshall duct-taping hundreds of sheets of paper to her front gate. Her family’s two guard dogs were barking uncontrollably and snapped at the marshall through the bars of the gate, but he was determined.⁠
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The orders from the court were that the journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, must be served with 19 defamation lawsuits filed against her, in one go, by a wealthy and powerful business figure. A few months later she was dead, murdered by a remotely-triggered car bomb.⁠
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We are a group of civil society organisations that consider this to be the most egregious case of SLAPPs we have seen so far, aggravated by the fact that the cases have continued after Caruana Galizia’s death against her widower and three sons.⁠
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“SLAPP” stands for Strategic Lawsuit against Public Participation. It’s a form of legal harassment designed to intimidate critical voices into silence. Expensive and unscrupulous law firms market this attack-dog service to powerful and wealthy individuals who can afford to drag on abusive proceedings for years just to shield themselves from unwanted public scrutiny. More and more journalists and civil society organisations are being sued by powerful businessmen and politicians.⁠⁠

Read our collective opinion-piece in full on Euractiv.