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The government has refused to accept a proposed change to the law to stop super-rich oligarchs using their wealth to intimidate and silence investigative journalists to exploit British courts.
State Security Minister Tom Tugendhat on Thursday refused to accept an amendment to the Economic Crimes Bill that would have empowered judges to dismiss legal cases brought against journalists if they found such cases to be strategic lawsuits against public participation (slaps) to silence public-interest journalism. Designed for.
A cross-party coalition of parliamentarians is calling for changes to the law to “prevent the use of court processes to silence investigative journalists”, with the threat of hundreds of millions of pounds in legal costs following a flurry of slaps seeking to “silence investigative journalists”. ”
Liam Byrne, Labor MP for Birmingham Hodge Hill, said: “It is simply a scandal that the English courts, once renowned as sanctuaries of justice, are now infamous as arenas of silence where some of the richest people on earth are trying to silence journalists. Working, uncovering fraud, money laundering and sanctioning in search of truth.
“We have become a global center for legal action against people who are so bold and brave in trying to bring crime to public attention.”
Byrne said that so many slaps have been launched recently that the oligarchs’ “playbook” is becoming clear. “The first company or oligarch will try to target an individual journalist rather than the organization they work for, because frankly they know they can intimidate the person,” he told parliament. “Then they will file the most ridiculously exaggerated claims.”
He said the oligarchs were abusing the UK courts because they were not interested in winning the cases they brought. “They’re only interested in incurring as much expense as possible to hurt the poor party, then they go to great lengths to try to intimidate the person.”
Byrne told parliament that examples of slaps included Roman Abramovich suing journalist Catherine Belton over her book Putin’s People and Kazakh mining firm ENRC suing FT journalist Tom Burgess over his book “Dirty Money”. The journalists eventually won their case, he said, “but only after months of court action risking a fortune in legal costs”.
He also raised the issue of defamation suits filed in August against four publishers of investigative reports into allegations about the assets of a fund named after former Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev.
“It is simply outrageous that a country that prides itself as the home of free speech is now using the courts to silence journalists,” Byrne said.
Tugendhat said he agreed the law needed to be amended to deal with the threat of slaps on public interest journalism, but adding an amendment to the Economic Crimes Bill was not appropriate.
“The way to address this is not to treat it as just an economic problem; It’s not,” he said. “It’s not just a crime that affects the movement of dirty money. It’s a crime that’s really about freedom of speech and really about access to justice.
Tugendhat said the problem was more of an issue for the Ministry of Justice, and that he would work on a piece of “anti-slaps legislation” that would address the entire problem.
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