Slapped down

Daphne Caruana Galizia was on her way to the bank when her car blew up. A bomb had been planted under the driver’s seat while it was parked outside her home in Bidnija, Malta. The investigative journalist was trying to gain access to her accounts which had been frozen in connection to a libel case against her by Malta’s Economy Minister Chris Cardona.

But this wasn’t the only legal action Caruana Galizia was confronting. At the time she was killed, in October 2017, she was subject to over 40 separate Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation, also known as ‘SLAPPs’.

The proliferation of SLAPPs is posing an increasingly significant, but often hidden, challenge to journalists around the world in their role as society’s watchdog. SLAPPs are used by the powerful and wealthy in order to evade scrutiny – by intimidating journalists and activists into withholding or withdrawing information from public debate. They first emerged in the 1970s as