EU member states adopted legislation on Tuesday to better protect journalists and activists from lawsuits aimed at intimidating them into silence.
The legal actions, called strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPP), are designed to prevent people from speaking out on areas of public interest like human rights or the environment.
A major part of the legislation is to make it easier to dismiss SLAPP cases against journalists and activists easier and quicker if it is obvious the claims are clearly unfounded.
Another feature reverts the costs of legal proceedings and representation of a case found to be a SLAPP lawsuit onto the claimant. Judges may also impose penalties on plaintiffs as further deterrence.
Once the legislation has been published in the EU Official Journal, a register of EU law, the 27 EU member states have two years to transfer the regulations into national law.
The murdered investigative journalist and blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia, one of Malta's best-known journalists, was a well-known victim of SLAPP.
According to the European Commission, 47 SLAPP complaints were filed against Galizia. She investigated corruption in connection with a contract for a power plant and links to the highest levels of politics in 2017. She was killed in a car bomb attack that same year.