Law students from the European Union are reporting for JURIST on law-related events in and affecting the European Union and its member states. Jacky-Long Mouthuy is a law student at Maastricht University. He files this dispatch from Maastricht, Netherlands.
Yesterday, November 2, was the UN’s International Day to End Impunity for Crimes Against Journalists. Ahead of this occasion, on October 31st, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide, released its annual Global Impunity Index. The report compiles data on the prosecution of the murderers of journalists as a means to raise awareness on persecution of the press. CPJ concludes that freedom of the press is currently under increasing pressure in European Union countries, although they are still among the safest places in the world when it comes to journalist protection according to Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index.
In 2010, Greek journalist Sokratis Giolias was shot and killed outside his home just as he was about to publish an article on corruption. No one has yet been found guilty of the crime, with flaws found in authorities’ investigation into his murder. In 2017, Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who had reported on government corruption and the Panama Papers, died in a car bomb. In 2018, Slovak journalist Ján Kuciak, who investigated tax fraud committed by businessmen linked to prominent Slovak politicians, was murdered with his fiancée in their home. In 2021, Greek journalist Giorgos Karaivaz was shot dead on his way home, and the same year Dutch journalist Peter R. de Vries was killed as he left a TV studio in Amsterdam.
Those murders have a chilling effect on journalists and the press. But murder is not the only means of press intimidation. More recently, at 6 AM on the 27th of September 2023, French journalist Ariane Lavrilleux was taken in custody for thirty-nine hours by French anti-terrorism forces after they raided her apartment to collect her laptop, phones, SD cards and notes. The aim was to identify her sources. She had published several articles on the selling of French armament to other countries and also on the Sirli operation whereby France provided intelligence to Egypt to combat terrorism, but which instead was used to kill civilians suspected of trafficking, with French officials turning a blind eye. Short-term custody of journalists is not a new practice in France where several journalists have been interrogated by the intelligence services after revealing flaws in the attribution of public markets by the army. And in 2019, authorities raided Mediapart’s offices after it published a series of investigation articles involving President Macron. That raid was later deemed unlawful by a court.
In addition to such coercive measures, authorities as well as individuals may also use so-called SLAPPs (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) to intimidate the press. SLAPPs are exaggerated or unfounded legal actions used abusively to harass, intimidate and burden those acting in the public interest with legal fees until they stop. Those typically targeted are journalists, publishing houses, media, and human rights and environmental activists. This is a type of legal harassment and an abuse of the legal system that is increasingly used across the EU. The NGO Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe estimates that there are 820 open cases today, up from 570 in 2022 throughout Europe.
At the time of her assassination, Daphne Caruana Galizia was facing 48 lawsuits. Her death prompted the European Commission to propose the Anti-SLAPP Directive, also called Daphne’s Law, to accelerate legal proceedings and provide financial security to defendants in cases of manifestly unfounded and/or abusive legal proceedings. The European Parliament voted in favour of the proposal this October. The Council of the EU, made up of the ministers of each EU Member State, must now vote on it.
The draft law has been followed by another Commission proposal, the Media Freedom Act, which has been adopted by the European Parliament in early October. The Act awaits the Council’s approval in order to become law. The MDA grants a set of rights to media including among others the protection of journalistic sources, the prohibition of EU Member States from interfering with editorial policies and from “deploying spyware in any device or machine used by media service providers”. The proposal also provides duties to media, such as to ensure that editors are “free to take individual editorial decisions” and “to disclose any actual or potential conflict of interest that may affect the provision of news and current affairs content”.
EU action is certainly good news for freedom of the press and the protection of journalists and their sources. The above proposals join the Whistleblower Directive adopted in 2019 which protects people who report breaches of EU law on a wide range of topics from their employer, public authorities and the public at large. Those three legal acts are expected to safeguard media plurality and free access to information, thus enhancing democracy in the EU. The measures alone are likely not going to resolve all of the issues that media are facing, however. The EU is now engaged on a long road to strengthen media freedom and access to information, but the Anti-SLAPP Directive and the Media Freedom Act show that it is going in the right direction.
