SLAPPs: New Economic Crime Bill amendment to protect UK journalists from intimidation lawsuits

A government-backed amendment expected to be introduced in Parliament tomorrow will make it harder for the rich and powerful to use London’s courts to silence journalists and campaigners, openDemocracy understands.

In a significant development for reporting on corruption, a new provision to the Economic Crime Bill will give UK citizens their first specific protection in law from aggressive legal action known as SLAPPs (strategic lawsuits against public participation).

In November, openDemocracy joined forces with over 70 leading editors, publishers, lawyers and journalists to call on the government to make good on its promises to reform the law to protect journalists in the UK from these notorious intimidation lawsuits.

The UK has become the leading international source of legal threats against journalists investigating financial crime and corruption, according to research by the Foreign Policy Centre think tank in 2020.

The government previously promised to introduce specific legislation to address the problem. But sources with knowledge of the government’s thinking have told openDemocracy that it will instead amend legislation that is already before Parliament, the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill.

This is a more limited approach to the issue because it will affect only SLAPPs relating to economic crime. But it has the advantage of being likely to come into law soon, as the bill has already passed several stages of parliamentary scrutiny.

It’s thought that the new measures will include a provision for early dismissal of cases deemed to be SLAPPs. It will not include measures to cap costs on defendants’ legal bills – a key demand from campaigners – which would require secondary legislation.

But it’s expected that the definition of SLAPP in the amendment will include a recognition of the economic imbalance that is often a hallmark of such abusive cases, in which powerful individuals use the threat of escalating legal costs to silence comment and curtail scrutiny.

It’s also thought that the new legislation will allow judges to consider if claimants are abusing the legal process by targeting an individual journalist rather than their employer, in an attempt to use the economic imbalance to their advantage.

This happened in the notorious libel action taken by sanctioned Russian warlord Yvegeny Prigozhin against British journalist Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat. Prigozhin sued Higgins personally for tweets about the story rather than his employer Bellingcat, which allowed him to establish a case in London, rather than in the Netherlands where Bellingcat is based. It also allowed the billionaire oligarch to pit his considerable economic resources against those of just one journalist.

openDemocracy revealed that Prigozhin’s lawyers in Moscow were clear that he wasn’t interested in securing compensation from Higgins, but rather sought to undermine Higgins’ reporting and by extension the sanctions that had been imposed upon him.

A handful of peers, MPs and interest groups have been briefed on the proposed amendment, which they have been told will come this week.

Campaigners are likely to welcome the developments as a significant first step in the fight against SLAPPs in the UK, but will continue to press for the stand alone legislation and wider measures that were first promised by government last year.