Reporters Shield offers Journalists Worldwide SLAPP Protection

With the European Union’s plans for outlawing SLAPPs potentially in doubt, he United States and media organisation OCCRP have announced a program to increase journalists’ access to insurance coverage, offering a degree of protection from against being buried under legal costs.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) announced the Reporters Shield program at an event to mark World Press Freedom Day 2023 at the United Nations.

“Many independent outlets can't afford to be sued, so they are driven out of business or they try to self censor to avoid attracting the interest of those who might target them,” said USAID Administrator Samantha Power.

“Corrupt leaders know all this, which is why they're using lawfare more and more,” said Power, a former journalist, describing what she said was a growing tactic aimed not at winning suits but getting reporters to back off.

Reporters Shield Startup Director Peter Noorlander told Blueprint for Free Speech the program would help journalists in the European Union, where they are besieged by suits or in countries with leaders resistant to the EU proposal.

“There is only a small number of countries where the rule of law is non-existent or in such decline that we can't work there, but countries such as Hungary and Bulgaria are very much countries where we will work,” he said.

“We are not naive, we know it will be hard, but if we start making judgment calls on countries like this then we wouldn't be fulfilling our mission of standing by journalists hit with SLAPPs,” he added.

USAID said it plans to work with Congress to provide up to $9 million for the Reporters Shield program that will be jointly managed by the EU-based Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice in New York.

“To withstand lawfare, journalists and media outlets need robust protection, they need training in how to avoid lawsuits altogether, they need resources to hire lawyers and cover legal fees,” Power said.

USAID said Reporters Shield will be a membership program and organizations will pay an annual fee based on factors like the outlet's location and how many stories they produce a year, reported Reuters.

It is a membership group and will support those hit with a SLAPP with lawyers provided from the plan's network being built with the Vance Center, paid up to a pre-agreed limit.

The EU member states, such as Croatia, where an estimated 951 SLAPP cases are active against journalists, have seen a proliferation of the suits, but there's no way to measure how many journalists, or their publishers, have declined to proceed with stories out of the fear of being sued.

Mediapool, a Bulgarian fact-checking news website, faces the threat of bankruptcy after an insurance company filed a SLAPP suit for the record sum of 1 million leva (€500,000) for a story based on the official transcript of a government session.

A Serbian investigative media site, KRIK – a member of the Global Investigative Journalism Network (GIJN) - is facing 11 lawsuits connected with its work, which require a costly defense and attention that could otherwise be dedicated to journalism.

“Journalists and editors need to meet with lawyers, prepare a defense, evidence, and other documents for court,” Deputy Editor Bojana Jovanović said. “That means spending a lot of time on court cases and not journalism and investigations.”

“This is exactly what those who are suing us want — to focus on ourselves, to defend and seek justice — instead of investigating them and their corrupted deals and criminal ties,” she said.

Blueprint for Free Speech is a member of the European Union-funded Pioneering Anti-SLAPP Training for Freedom of Expression (PATFox) project, which has been providing anti-SLAPP training to legal professionals in 11 EU member states over the course of 2022 and 2023.

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