THE CONTROVERSY OF SLAPPS
On 17 March 2022, the UK government launched a Call for Evidence for reforms to tackle strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPS). Consequently, the SLAPPs bill was proposed by Wayne David, the member of parliament for Caerphilly and, on 8 May 2024, it returned to the House of Commons for its committee stage.
According to a press release issued by the government, SLAPPS are “legal threats brought to intimidate and financially and psychologically exhaust journalists, campaigners and anyone who would criticise or expose corruption”. As matters stand, the bill seeks to cover a broad scope of SLAPPs across all forms of litigation including sexual harassment. The intention behind the SLAPPs bill is to resolve an imbalance of resources between wealthy claimants and individual journalists.
A number of groups have emerged in support of the SLAPP legislation including the Coalition Against SLAPPS in Europe (CASE) which, according to the ‘key research findings’ on its website, states that SLAPPs cases have increased from 570 cases in 2022 to over 820 cases in 2023.
However, it is unclear from the CASE report which provided the data what litigation is included in the statistics, which used a ‘snowball sampling’ method, and when cases were identified, as many did not turn out to be SLAPPs but rather difficult pieces of media litigation.
In this article we set out the key issues that we consider arise from the current version of the proposed SLAPPs bill.
Jul-Sep 2024 issue
Brown Rudnick