Croatia will be among the first in the EU with concrete measures against SLAPP lawsuits that will be included in the new media law, the Ministry of Culture and Media has said, and journalists' associations are disappointed with the "watered down" anti-SLAPP directive adopted by the Council of the EU.

SLAPPs, or strategic lawsuits against public participation, are baseless lawsuits initiated from a position of power to intimidate and silence critical voices in society on issues of public interest, and the victims of such lawsuits are usually journalists and the media.

Earlier this month, the Council of the European Union adopted a common position on the Anti-SLAPP Directive. The new directive, proposed by the European Commission in 2022, is intended to address the growing problem of strategic lawsuits targeting journalists, activists and other public critical voices across Europe.

Journalists’ associations: Far from original goal of law

However, the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) believes that the text, which is considerably “watered down”, falls short of the original goal of the law on the protection of journalists and the right to information in the EU. The Croatian Journalists’ Union (SNH) reacted similarly, sending an open letter in which it expressed disappointment with the general approach adopted by the Council of the EU.

“With this position, the Council takes a step back in the fight against the increasingly frequent use of unfounded and abusive court proceedings, significantly diluting the key provisions in the original text,” underscored the SNH, which is headed, like the EFJ, by Maja Sever.

As a shortcoming, they cite a very restrictive definition of “obviously unfounded cases”, which significantly weakens the key mechanism of early rejection of the lawsuit and reduces the protection available to the “target”, as well as the deletion of the provision on compensatory damages for those who were the target of SLAPPs.

Ministry: Unquestionable and clear support for independent journalism

The Ministry of Culture and Media made a comment on SNH’s open letter to Hina. “It should be clearly said that there is no place for such accusations as far as Croatia is concerned. Because, we have announced that regardless of the final text of the directive, which refers to cross-border cases, we will include provisions on early recognition and rejection of SLAPP lawsuits in our new media act,” the ministry said.

In support of this, they cited specific steps they have taken so far, including a series of public workshops for judges and also a clear emphasis that provisions for the prevention of SLAPP lawsuits would be incorporated into the national legislation, as well as the umbrella strategic act, the National Plan for the Development of Culture and Media from 2023 until 2027, in the preparation of which representatives of the Croatian Journalists’ Association (HND) and the SNH, as well as numerous other expert stakeholders from the media sector and the academic community, have taken part.

They also added that they systematically started dealing with the issue of SLAPPs in mid-2021, when an expert working group was established to create a policy to combat SLAPPs, without waiting for the proposal for a directive that was published in April 2022.

Not all lawsuits against media can be considered SLAPPs

Asked about the number of SLAPPs against Croatian media and journalists in comparison with such lawsuits in EU countries, that is, whether the problem of SLAPPs in Croatia was more pronounced than elsewhere in Europe, as the HND points out, the ministry said there were no concrete data yet.

No official research on the number of SLAPPs in the European Union or in Croatia has been carried out, and as legal experts always stress, not all lawsuits against media can qualify as SLAPPs, it was said.

Currently, the only comparative study on the number of SLAPPs in Europe was conducted and released by the CASE (Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe) association of journalists. In a report published in March 2022, it said that a total of 33 SLAPPs were filed in Croatia in the period from 2010 to 2021, according to their estimates, the ministry said.

According to that study, more SLAPPs than in Croatia were recorded in Malta (42), Slovenia (41), Bosnia and Herzegovina (40), Poland (119), and France (50), and they are also present in all other countries.