The Croatian Journalists' Association (HND) said on Monday that the government had taken a worrying position on the anti-SLAPP directive by supporting a considerably watered-down approach that does not provide an effective framework for stopping SLAPP lawsuits.

The purpose of regulating SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation), or strategic lawsuits against freedom of speech, is to deter prosecutors and shorten court proceedings to a duration necessary for a court to establish that the case at hand concerns SLAPP, a press conference was told outside the Ministry of Justice and Administration in Zagreb.

HND president Hrvoje Zovko said that SLAPP lawsuits are an attack on freedom of speech, used by politicians, business people and judges to prosecute journalists.

“In this regard, Croatia is the worst country in the European Union. Although the Ministry of Culture and Media has formed a task force to deal with the SLAPP issue, we are not satisfied. For five years we have been listening to empty promises from the government with nothing concrete being done,” Zovko said.

Although there are no considerable obstacles in the Croatian legal system to introducing minimum standards to protect journalists and other targets of SLAPP from wanton litigation, the government has embraced a general approach by the Council of Europe which has considerably watered down the European Commission’s proposal and which does not provide an effective framework for stopping SLAPP lawsuits.

The results of the HND’s latest survey on defamation lawsuits against journalists and the media show that 945 such lawsuits are currently active in Croatia, and that the longest-running case has been pending for 33 years.

“SLAPP lawsuits are a new form of attack on the journalistic profession. Today you don’t have to hit or attack anyone physically, it’s enough to harass them with lawsuits, and we are talking about tens of millions of euros in claims for damages,” Zovko said.

The president of the European Federation of Journalists (EJF) and the Croatian Journalists’ Union, Maja Sever, said that the statements by the HND, EJF and other associations were their joint appeal before the session of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, which will discuss, among other things, the anti-SLAPP directive.

“Over the last month we have been following the watering down of documents that are supposed to protect freedom of the press. A year before elections, it is much better for politicians to be on good terms with publishers than with journalists. We are here to draw attention to that. Deliver on your promises, what are you afraid of?” Sever said.

She said that the proposed framework for stopping SLAPP lawsuits was not effective because the scope of the directive would be limited to narrowly-defined cross-border cases, when prosecution is conducted in another EU member state.

Sever said that the new “softened” approach weakens the mechanism for early rejection of SLAPP lawsuits, annuls compensation for targets of SLAPP lawsuits, and excludes civil actions launched in criminal proceedings from the scope of the directive.