Justice Minister Owen Bonnici on Tuesday morning insisted that he had rejected the Opposition’s amendments to a law protecting the media from abusive lawsuits as these would be in breach of EU law.
Addressing a press briefing to outline some of the changes that will be implemented once the new Media and Defamation Bill came into force, Dr Bonnici said that he had based his decision on advice given to him by experts, who insisted the Opposition’s amendments presented on Monday would violate EU rules.
Asked by the Times of Malta whether he felt he was contradicting himself when insisting that he wanted to offer journalists full protection but then not agreeing to the amendments, Dr Bonnici said this was not the case.
“With this law we are removing the possibility that SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) lawsuits occur in Malta. The most common SLAPP suits occur here,” Dr Bonnici went on.
SLAPP lawsuits are designed to silence and intimidate critics, often by burdening them with lawsuits in foreign jurisdictions.
On what was being done to tackle SLAPP suits from countries outside Europe, which are becoming increasingly more common, Dr Bonnici insisted that journalists could not respond to such suits.
EU lawmakers have already asked the European Commission to propose anti-SLAPP directives, but the justice minister said that the government did not rule out being part of a discussion on such a directive and would be willing to discuss options at EU level.
Pressed to say whether the government would be backing such a directive, the minister re-iterated that it was "in everybody’s interest" to protect journalists.
The government, he said, had not sought advice from bodies within the EU but from four separate legal entities – three Maltese lawyers and UK firm Bird and Bird.
On the changes that would be rolled out once the Bill became law, Dr Bonnici said that this was “a new page in the era of journalism” and that the law will bring about some 18 reforms.
Flanked by the government’s head of communications Kurt Farrugia, the minister noted that the dropping of criminal libels, including any pending ones, and new rights when responding to libels were among the most important changes to the law.
These changes, he added, would hopefully also bring about a change in the mentality of the country, where mediation would start being preferred. This was the case with the censorship and vilification of religion laws which were updated in the previous legislature.