Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation

Tony Lloyd Excerpts

Thursday 17th March 2022 Commons Chamber

[Dominic Raab]

As ever, my hon. Friend absolutely nails the point. These reforms are targeted at a specific problem, which is recent and burgeoning, and we do not want to conflate that because it might hit other areas and do ancillary or incidental harm and because that is a displacement of our effort and our energies.

My hon. Friend asked more generally about what we are doing around the world. When I was Foreign Secretary, we ramped up the Media Freedom Coalition, which, in my time, we chaired with the Canadians. I am not sure whether it is them or us who currently hold the chairmanship—I think it is the Canadians. We expanded that coalition. The idea was to help with the legislation that countries have to protect free speech and to ensure that, when journalists come under attack, they get legal support. We raised quite a lot of money and we keep working on it. I know that the current Foreign Secretary is enthusiastic and energetic about it.

[Tony Lloyd (Rochdale) (Lab)]

I, too, welcome the Justice Secretary’s statement. He has well specified the problem and the need for urgency, so I urge maximum speed, although he is right to be cautious about getting the legislation right. There should be a presumption that the public interest test is right. That test is not synonymous with the British state; I hope he would agree with that. Nor is it necessarily, in this complicated world, synonymous only with the UK national interest. Will he ensure that the test takes the widest possible view about what is good for this complicated world, because that matters against the oligarchs?

[Dominic Raab]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right and makes one of the most important points. If he looks at the call for evidence and the menu of options that we set out, we look at the threshold for bringing SLAPPs and whether there ought to be a new right of public participation. We look at the various defences in defamation law to see whether they are sufficient to deal with this problem. That includes the public defence and the serious harm test of a defamatory statement. We are trying to look at it from every angle. I should add for completeness that we will look at whether we are getting the right balance in terms of being an attractive destination for litigants to want to solve disputes, which is a great USP for the country, and whether we have allowed and given succour to libel tourism in this particularly pernicious area. We will look at all those things and I look forward to his further thoughts in those areas.