Mr John Whittingdale
(Maldon) (Con)
I, too, warmly welcome my right hon. Friend’s statement. As he said, however, SLAPPs are an international phenomenon that are used across Europe to stifle investigative journalism. Most notorious, perhaps, are the 47 lawsuits that were being brought against Daphne Caruana Galizia at the time of her murder in Malta in 2017. Does he therefore agree that protecting freedom of the press properly will require international action? Can he say what discussions he has had with his counterparts in other jurisdictions to bring about co-ordinated action?
The Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice
Dominic Raab
My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. I mentioned the European figures; it is clearly a much broader phenomenon. One of the things that we have looked at is the threshold. To give an illustration of a jurisdiction that we have looked at, in the United States, there needs to be malice, I think, for most libel cases. Under the US constitution, there are a whole series of judicially enforceable rights that are probably stronger than in this country under the European convention on human rights or otherwise in relation to free speech. We will look carefully at the bespoke libel laws that we have and we are mindful of the lessons that we can learn from other jurisdictions.
