Skip to content

Wikimedia Europe

Visual Portfolio, Posts & Image Gallery for WordPress

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Markus Trienke, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Michael S Adler, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Sergey Pesterev / Wikimedia Commons

Stefan Krause, Germany, FAL, via Wikimedia Commons

JohnDarrochNZ, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Benh LIEU SONG (Flickr), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Charles J. Sharp, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

640px-Wikimedia_Europe_logo_-_vertical

EU Anti-SLAPP Directive: It is time for national governments to act in favor of the public interest!

Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

SLAPPs are “strategic lawsuits against public participation”: legal cases brought to the courts in order to threaten and/or silence journalists, activists, and academics, including Wikipedia volunteer contributors. This legal phenomenon risks causing a chilling effect, which may be particularly acute in the case of those people who contribute voluntarily to Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects.

Last year, the European Union (EU) decided to take a major step to address this serious issue, and adopted the Anti-SLAPP Directive. It is now the turn of national governments to play their role and adopt strong national transposition laws to fulfill their responsibilities towards civil society and the public interest.

It is crucial that EU governments put in place strong and tailored safeguards, which can protect the fundamental rights to freedom of expression as well as privacy of those who make reliable information available to European society, including Wikipedia volunteer contributors. We call upon them to recognize the specificities of the SLAPPs targeting anonymous public participation, exactly as the Council of Europe did in its Recommendation.