The global campaign of billionaire-backed strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP suits) targeting independent media is not about defamation. It is about breaking media and media criticism.
A new set of cases in a billionaire’s forum of choice — the UK (and US) courts — threatens to bankrupt some of the world’s leading independent investigative journalism networks.
Two not-for-profit investigative journalism organisations facing writs in the UK, openDemocracy and the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, have told The Guardian that the writs were “potentially financially ruinous” and the cost of defending them could wipe out all their funding.
For SLAPP-happy billionaire litigants targeting independent journalism, that’s a feature, not a bug.
London’s The Daily Telegraph is also being sued in the British courts. Meanwhile, a parallel case has been launched in the US against the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), an initiative of the Journalism Development Network run jointly out of Maryland in the US and Bucharest in Romania.
The cases are “a clear attempt to intimidate independent investigative journalism”, openDemocracy’s editor-in-chief Peter Geoghegan told The Guardian. “We are a small, not-for-profit media organisation being threatened by rich and powerful organisations for reporting on what we believe is in the public interest.”
The cases are being brought by Jusan Technologies and the Nazarbayev Fund, a private fund named for the former long-term president of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, over (incorrect and defamatory, per the lawyers) allegations of financial links between the two organisations and Nazarbayev and his family.
It’s not the first high-profile defamation case involving Kazakhstan. Tom Burgis and his publisher HarperCollins were sued (largely unsuccessfully) in the British courts over his book Kleptopia, which investigated the laundering of corrupt dealings through the UK finance industry.
Burgis (like author Catherine Belton who was sued over her related book, Putin’s People) had the benefit of having a billionaire-backed publisher in his corner through the Murdoch family’s controlling interest in HarperCollins’ parent company, News Corp.
Most SLAPP-ed media aren’t so lucky. Writs tend to be targeted at individual journalists and small, often start-up media for whom the cases can quickly escalate to the existential. It’s the imbalance of power in action: for the billionaire, a set-and-forget handballing of responsibility to the lawyers; for small media, they’re time-consuming, money-eating and soul-destroying.
Around the world, SLAPPs come hand in hand with oligarchs and rising authoritarianism.
Yevgeny Prigozhin — the oligarch’s oligarch (most recently seen recruiting prisoners from Russia’s jails to fight in Ukraine) and head of mercenary Wagner Group — used the UK courts to sue journalist Eliot Higgins, founder of open-source media Bellingcat. The writ went after Higgins personally over tweets linking to articles in The Insider and Der Spiegel. The case was struck out in May due to non-compliance with court orders by then sanctioned Prigozhin.
While the British and US cases (and some here in Australia) get the publicity, it’s in the global south where the damage SLAPP-based defamation does to democracy is clearest. A 2020 study by the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law found that about 88% of cases it surveyed were wholly or partly based on defamation, including some on criminal defamation (still on the books as a crime in Australia too).
In Brazil, under President Jair Bolsonaro, writer João Paulo Cuenca calls it “Kafka in the tropics”; he has been sued 140 times after alleging advertising money was being funnelled by the Brazilian government to evangelical-owned media.
Bolsonaro supporter Luciano Hang — owner of the Havan retail chain and alliteratively tagged by Bloomberg as “Brazil’s brashest billionaire” — has initiated at least 37 cases in the past decade, according to a survey by the Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism (ABRAJI).
In the Columbia Journalism Review, this month Joel Simon and Carlos Lauria concluded: “When it comes to SLAPPs, journalists and media outlets lose even when they win. Saddled with legal costs and lost hours, they may think twice before taking on the next critical investigation.
“In too many instances, the law has become an instrument of repression — and the public is left in the dark.”
well said – and i admire your restraint in not mentioning Little Lachy
Yes, it looks like there will be more use of generic allusions to cover specific targets or subject matter in order to avoid defamation writs or other sanctions in what is fast becoming a more authoritarian world. In authoritarian countries, writers used these tactics to avoid political imprisonment. It shows up in art, theatre and film as well. For example, the great US sitcom, Mash was contextually set in the Korean war but was really a black comedy about the Vietnam war.
Correct, our pollies and senior public servants are easily bought by the billionaires. We are in a serious pickle. They are all on the make so there will be no changes. The system as it is suits corrupt people just fine.
And then, of course, is the biggest SLAPP of all, the imprisonment of Assange by the British and the attempt to extradite him to the USA.
Should qualify as a crime against humanity – and the prosecutors should be doing prison time.
Very depressing reading, the future of investigative journalism looks bleak.
Major international corporations & the world’s population of secretive Billionaires are the cause of the clampdown on investigative journalists, why, because both the above have much to hide from the general public no matter which country.
Meanwhile, governments care less about the people that had elected them, governments prefer to succour the wealthy corporations and their country’s sinister Billionaires.
I can rattle off a series of Billionaires in Australia that don’t give a damn about obeying the laws in the land they live in,
as they are able to pay off our Supreme court & Federal Court judges, as well as Australia’s Regulatory Authorities.
This had been evidenced during the Royal Commission of Inquiry launched into Australia’s Financial Services Sector.
Each of Australia’s big banks was discovered to be ripping off account holders for fees where fees were not due nor justifiable.
At that former time, both ASIC & APRA were cozying up to the banking Chairman & its Director’s Boards, while the most dishonest of the banks had been the Which Bank.
There must not be a compliant or co-conspirator national regulatory authority tolerated, but, not one of the crooksters was sent to prison for their instituted & programmed thefts discovered through & or by the R/Commission.
It is here we are able to claim that there is no pristine justice pursued nor sought by the judiciary appointees in this nation of Australia.
That’s a big call. Which judges?
All of them. Despite what we think, the Courts are controlled by the State and Federal Government’s albeit indirectly. Aside from the High Court, all the others can be dispensed with at the Governments pleasure (called a restructure) and the Judges benched and replaced with more “compliant” judges. Alternatively, funding can be used to encourage compliance with the Government’s policies. Not likely, but certainly not impossible.
I had the same thought. Getting regulatory bodies underfunded and barely able to regulate a puppy, sure. Judges though?
Interesting how Anglosphere powers that be promote antipathy towards ‘globalisation’ in same terms as Madison Grant criticised ‘internationalisation’ a century ago because it encourages liberal democracy and empowerment of less developed nations or citizens.
This is exactly what they don’t want while availing themselves of lopsided trade treaties or better, trading outside constraints e.g. Brexit for avoiding EU constraints inc. regulation, science promotion, freedom of speech, anti-SLAPP directives etc..