A Judicial War on Truth

With sophisticated tactics, but with a single aim: to protect their interests and cover up their abuses, the enemies of freedom of information have launched an innovative and abusive campaign to exploit the judicial system. This campaign consists of so-called “Scale to Silence Public Participation” (SLAPP) lawsuits, legal procedures that prevent investigations from being completed or their findings from being published in the media. But the consequences go far beyond that, also crippling citizens’ exercise of free speech and intimidating those who might report similar crimes or investigate human rights violations.

By examining some of the most prominent cases of Strategic to Silence Public Participation (SLAPP) lawsuits—by name—we find religious groups, lobbying groups, corporations, and institutions, and their preferred victims: environmentalists, investigative journalists, human rights activists, and artists. This systematic text explains these legal maneuvers and outlines the measures taken to protect us from them. Our era has its own forms of censorship; identifying and curbing one of them, at least in truly democratic societies, is the urgent task we address in these pages.