PATFox holds showcase event in Brussels: How Legal Training helps us understand - and counter - abusive litigation

On 28th of February, PATFox Consortium gathered in Brussels for our project first project sharing-knowledge event, Anti-SLAPP Legal training: Experiences from the PATFox Project.

The event was held on the at the premises of the European Parliament, Room SPAAK 7C50 and online. All of us involved in the project would like to register our thanks to the Chair of the European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE), Mr Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar MEP, who hosted the event.

We are also grateful to the President of the European Parliament, Madame Roberta Metsola MEP who together with Mr Lopez Aguilar, delivered the closing remarks.

LIBE Chair Juan Fernando Lopez Aguilar MEP and European Parliament President Roberta Metsola MEP

The event was aimed at showcasing our draft Anti-SLAPP curriculum and the resources that can now be found online on our Curriculum Hub. In addition, we wanted to share initial insights from the first round of local workshops and engage in a wider discussion on anti-SLAPP initiatives. The event itself was attended by MEPs and members of their offices, lawyers, academics, NGO representatives, and journalists.

In the first roundtable discussion our European legal expert, Prof. Justin Borg Barthet, one of the local legal trainer, Vanja Juric, attorney at law from Croatia, and also member of the European Commission's expert group on SLAPPs, and a target of SLAPP Bettina Behrend, member of the board of Rettet den Regenwald (Save the Rainforest), who set the scene by discussing the challenges and opportunities of taking action against SLAPPs.

First roundtable: Professor Borg-Barthet is speaking via videolink; on the podium (L-R) Vanja Juric and Naomi Colvin

The participation of Rettet den Regenwald was very timely as the organisation had recently announced the resolution of the suit brought against it by an Indonesian company. Bettina Behrend was able to explain that, notwithstanding that the settlement agreement was largely in favour of the NGO, the organisation had experienced significant difficulties in reaching this resolution.

Professor Borg-Barthet characterised SLAPPs as fundamentally “a misuse of the legal process in order to manipulate democratic processes.” One of the key issues for members of the legal profession encountering SLAPPs was to understand that these suits concerned a misuse of process to suppress the rights of the defendant rather than a balance of rights in the usual way.

Vanja Juric highlighted how SLAPPs, which can cause “existential” problems for individual defendants, can in turn become systemic problems for democratic societies. Citing examples from Croatia, Juric highlighted “a wide range of self-censorship and chilling effects”, all of which threatened “to stop public debate on really important issues.”

This initial discussion was followed by a series of roundtables bringing together those directly involved in training across the 11 project countries - Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Germany, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain.

During the first panel “First steps - introducing the issue of SLAPPs”, Prof. Dr. Maria Krambia Kapardis (CUT), Anuška Podvršič (Open), and Yana Pelovska (MDC), together with Ivan Godarsky (Memo’98) compared and evaluated their experiences on introducing the issue of SLAPPs in their national context, while Theodoros Economou and Tomáš Langer, attorneys at law and PATFox legal trainers, gave input as a practising lawyers in the field.

Second roundtable: (L-R) Ivan Godarsky, Theodoros Economou, Maria Krambia Kapardis, Yana Pelovska, Anuška Podvršič and Tomáš Langer,

Anuška Podvršič described the approach Open had taken to training in Slovenia, which had included a roundtable that brought together practising lawyers, academics, as well as members of the judiciary to discuss the proposed Directive in detail. Among the issues that had been discussed was the prevalence of SLAPPs using the criminal law in Slovenia and whether a transposed Anti-SLAPP law might be vulnerable to exploitation by plantiffs.

Tomáš Langer, who represents journalists and media organisations in the Slovakian courts, estimated that between ten and twenty per cent of the legal actions he now sees could be classified as SLAPPs. He identified some specific problems that existed nationally – among them the need for defendants to turn to crowdfunding in order to fund their legal defence, the prevalence of SLAPPs initiated by members of the judiciary themselves and the lack of resistance to legal manoeuvres that appeared to be intended to ramp up costs for defendants.

Yana Pelovska of Bulgaria’s Media Development Center explained that, while the term SLAPP was a relatively recent introduction, the were certainly cases that she and her colleagues had seen that seemed to fit the definition. When it came to training, examples from other jurisdictions were seen to be of particular value. She also suggested that Bulgaria would benefit from better national statistics and quantitative research on the prevalence of SLAPPs.

The second panel discussion “Purposely building a defence network” delved into the difficulties encountered in creating an anti-SLAPP network both at local and European level with Carla Camilleri (Aditus), and PATFox trainers Michael Zammit Maempel, Anna Wojcik (OKO) and Polish attorney at law Krzysztof Pluta and Cristina Lupu (CJI).

Third roundtable: (L-R) Anna Wojcik, Michael Zammit Maempel, Carla Camilleri , Anna Wojcik, Krzysztof Pluta and Cristina Lupu

This panel produced a fruitful discussion between participants from Malta, Romania and Poland about the “moving target” nature of SLAPP tactics: as reforms were introduced into national legal systems, SLAPP plaintiffs were adept in finding other weaknesses to exploit.

Krzysztof Pluta, who had acted for media organisations in Poland for many years, explained how criminal proceedings against journalists had become much more frequent in recent years. Before 2015, he had only seen two such cases. In recent years he had seen three such cases directed against his clients in the course of a week.

Michael Zammit Maempel said that this mirrored his own experience in Malta. While the country had excised criminal defamation from its legal code, he was now seeing computer crimes laws being used against his clients – laws which carry the possibility of much greater penalties. In some respects, Malta was more exposed to such threats as the status of English as an official language (and the language for practically all of the country’s investigative journalism), meant that stories that appeared in Malta could more easily be picked up by international media.

In the third panel “Responding to a difficult external environment” Sandor Orban (CIJ HU) and Sanja Pavic (GONG), together with PATFox legal trainer Bea Bodrogi focused on specific issues related with the hostile contexts faced in Hungary and Croatia.

Fourth roundtable: (L-R) Sanja Pavic, Bea Bodrogi and Sandor Orban

Two key issues came up for discussion – the impact of the concentration of media ownership and exploitation of public advertising placements in Hungary and the prevalence of SLAPP suits brought by the judiciary in Croatia. Interestingly, despite the acute situation in these two jurisdictions, there were links to be drawn with the experience in other project countries: similar issues with the placement of official advertising had been seen in Romania, and judges bringing SLAPP suits had also come up in the discussion on Slovakia.

Human rights attorney Bea Bodrogi, who had conducted the PATFox training in Hungary, drew particular attention to the use of GDPR complaints for SLAPP purposes. Noting that GDPR administrative proceedings are not covered by the proposed Anti-SLAPP Directive, Bodrogi explained how providing the legal reasoning for her clients to respond to such complaints was extremely onerous, taking “hours and hours”.

“SLAPPs, environmental activism and human rights defenders” was at centre of the last panel discussion with Philipp Wissing (Blueprint for Free Speech), attorney Dr. Nadine Dining, and Alessia Schiavon (FIBGAR).

Though discussion in this last roundtable was subject to some time constraints, Alessia Schiavon described some of the particular obstacles she had encountered introducing the concept of SLAPP, first characterised as such in Anglophone jurisdictions, in Spain.

Reception of the discussion in Germany was subject to a similar “ambivalence”: while German NGOs (particularly in the environmental sphere) and journalists are very aware of the prevalence of SLAPPs, there is some resistance to acknowledging the phenomenon on the official level. Efforts are currently underway nationally to produce a study on the prevalence of SLAPP cases, in an effort to move this debate forward.

This is only a partial accounting of the rich insights produced in the course of this event, which was attended by MEPs, lawyers, academics, NGO representatives, and journalists – many of whom followed the event remotely.

The recording of the event is available here.