Journalists as Defendants – SLAPP Lawsuits as an Overture into Exhaustion

Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation – in a nutshell, claimants most often do not seek justice in court with SLAPP, they want to exhaust or intimidate the respondents. It is precisely these methods that were recognised in the lawsuits that KRIK has received lately.

Ever since establishment in 2015, all the way until a year and a half ago, KRIK had faced only a few lawsuits, none of which having a negative outcome for the newsroom. Those lawsuits clearly meant pressure on the journalists’ work, but those were, as it turned out subsequently, isolated cases. Thus, in the past year, our newsroom was literally swamped with blue envelopes sent by courts, and in most of the nine ongoing court proceedings conducted against KRIK and its journalists, the plaintiffs are members of government or people close to them. The value of the proceedings is even three times higher than KRIK’s annual budget – the claimants requested almost 90 million dinars as damages from KRIK and its journalists. KRIK’s team, but also numerous organisations, see this blast of lawsuits as an attempt to exhaust KRIK and ultimately put it out.

This case study was developed as part of a joint effort by the Centre for Research, Transparency and Accountability (CRTA), the National Coalition for Decentralisation (NKD), the Belgrade Centre for Security Policy (BCSP) and Partners for Democratic Change, to encourage greater citizen participation in the decision-making process through the project “Citizens Have Power”, supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The views expressed in this case study are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views of USAID.