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Bullying lawyers target internet users who post negative reviews online with SLAPPs

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation have been deployed increasingly by the rich and powerful to try to censor some of the world’s leading investigative journalists

If you post on social media, blog or even write reviews on sites such as TripAdvisor or Amazon, you could be on the way to receiving a nasty SLAPP.

These cynical legal actions, known as Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs), have been deployed increasingly by the rich and powerful to try to censor some of the world’s leading investigative journalists.

London-based law firms have acquired an unsavoury international reputation for being willing to take cash from wealthy individuals in return for entangling genuine journalistic enquiries in legal barbed wire that is intended to intimidate and delay, and keep matters of public interest secret.

Now freedom of speech campaigners are seeing the same brutal SLAPP tactics deployed against members of the public who post matters of public interest online, criticising wealthy individuals or negatively reviewing organisations. Even though SLAPPs often have no merit, they can be costly to fight off, leaving defendants fearful for their homes and savings.

The Government is so concerned by the trend that Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer last week launched a taskforce aimed at banning SLAPPs in British courts. It includes representatives of the Bar Council and Law Society, as well media organisations and civil liberty groups.

If the taskforce is going to succeed, it will require a shift in culture within the British legal profession. It will also need widespread awareness of SLAPPs, among media professionals, academics, NGO campaigners and individuals who act in the public interest by posting critical online reviews of goods and services they have received.

Susan Coughtrie, director of the Foreign Policy Centre and co-chair of the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition, criticises as “disproportionate” the bullying letters sent by some SLAPP-happy legal firms.

“We are talking about the behaviours that lawyers choose to utilise themselves; the aggressive, smearing language, the questioning of integrity or making outlandish demands, such as ‘take the information down’ and ‘never write about our client again’,” she says.

Somehow the United Kingdom has allowed itself to become a centre for libel tourism and a global SLAPP hub. Incredibly, the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prighozhin was enabled by the UK authorities to launch a long-distance SLAPP case in the British courts against a British journalist.

Prighozhin, the world now knows, was the bloody warlord whose Wagner Group mercenaries took part in Russia’s flattening and occupation of Bakhmut. He then marched his motley army on the Kremlin in an aborted coup before he was apparently bumped off in a helicopter crash.

Back in 2021, before Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Prighozhin was given special licence by the UK Treasury to launch a personal legal attack on Eliot Higgins, founder of the Bellingcat investigative team, which had exposed him as a mercenary boss.

As Open Democracy revealed in January, the Treasury helped Prighozhin even though the UK had placed him under sanctions in 2020 for mercenary activity in Africa. A London legal firm, Discreet Law, took payment and flew to St Petersburg for client meetings with the Treasury’s knowledge.

The case collapsed last year when Discreet Law withdrew its services following Russia’s invasion. Higgins described the action, which cost him money to defend, as “one of the most blatant SLAPP cases I’ve encountered” and “a perfect example of how crooks like Prighozhin get to game the UK legal system to attack genuine investigative work”.

After last week’s task force announcement, he told me: “Until there is serious action by the government against SLAPPs there is still significant risk to any journalist that investigates wealthy individuals, so getting protections in place is a matter of urgency for a healthy democracy.”

SLAPPs have been used to try to silence such sleuths as Tom Burgis, Guardian investigations correspondent and author of Kleptopia, an exposé of dirty money in the global economy, and the financier and activist Bill Browder, who infuriates Moscow by relentlessly unpicking Kremlin money-laundering. Catherine Belton, former Moscow correspondent for the Financial Times, was subjected to a coordinated SLAPP by five Russian oligarchs over her book Putin’s People. It cost her publisher millions to defend.

A revised Economic Crime Bill should help prevent SLAPPs being used to censor future reporting of financial corruption. And a welcome warning notice to lawyers about using SLAPPs, issued by the Solicitors Regulation Authority last November, has prompted dozens of complaints about allegedly abusive litigation.

But some law firms are extending their range of SLAPP targets. Jessica Ni Mhainin, a co-chair of the Anti-SLAPP Coalition and head of policy at Index on Censorship, says members of the public are now being sued. “Some of the cases we are seeing are about people leaving reviews about companies and being SLAPPed as a result. These are reviews in the public interest,” she says. “This is not just an issue for journalists.”

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