Lord Hoffman, dissenting, noted that ‘the plaintiffs are forum shoppers in the most literal sense.’ In the years that followed, many international claimants followed their lead. Only 1915 copies of Forbes were distributed in the UK that week – compared with more than 750,000 in the US – but the House of Lords gave Berezovsky and Glushkov permission to sue Forbes’s editor, James Michaels, in London. In December 1996, Forbes described Boris Berezovsky and Nikolai Glushkov as ‘criminals on an outrageous scale’ in a story about Kremlin corruption under Boris Yeltsin. Third, the powerful often sue in England to intimidate their critics, especially anti-corruption activists, many of whom are based in London. Second, British courts – much like British company registrations – have a veneer of probity and respectability (there’s also a good chance the case will be reported in the SEO-friendly British media). First, English media law is claimant friendly. In his recent polemic, Lawfare (Harper, £10.99), the human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson identifies three reasons why autocrats, kleptocrats and multinationals are so fond of London’s libel courts. The UK is ‘by far the most frequent international country of origin’ for Slapps, according to a report published in 2020 by the Foreign Policy Centre. The stories that have gone unwritten while fighting the case are harder to quantify. No judge has heard a single word about the claim, but it has already cost openDemocracy tens of thousands of pounds. The case has been classified as a Slapp by the group Coalition against Slapps in Europe. The Nazarbayev Fund has since withdrawn, but Jusan has served proceedings. All had drawn heavily on reporting by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a network of investigative journalists, which was threatened with proceedings in the US. The following month it was revealed that a Nazarbayev foundation had spent at least $5 million on a documentary about Nazarbayev produced by Oliver Stone.Īfter a summer of lengthy – and very expensive – legal letters back and forth, Jusan and the Nazarbayev Fund sued openDemocracy, as well as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the Telegraph, which had reported similar allegations. A spokesperson for Jusan and the fund told the Guardian that their ‘sole mission is to support public education in Kazakhstan’. The allegations were almost identical, but this time the claimant was the Nazarbayev Fund. The following month another letter arrived from Boies Schiller Flexner. At the time of our story, it is believed Jusan had at most a single employee, no website and no address. The letter claimed that our reporting had caused significant financial loss to Jusan in the UK. Four months earlier, we had reported that Jusan held billions of dollars in assets that were ultimately controlled by the Nazarbayev Fund, whose chairman is the former leader of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev. The letter stated that openDemocracy, of which I am the editor-in-chief, had defamed a UK-registered shell company called Jusan Technologies. The most senior of them made it clear that he was ‘hearing from all sides’, but seemed particularly attentive to the way English courts were being used to muzzle public interest journalism.Ī few weeks later, I received a ‘pre-action letter’ from Boies Schiller Flexner, a law firm in New York whose clients have included Al Gore and Harvey Weinstein. The civil servants took notes and asked sharp questions. I described my fear of losing my home after an MP sued me (personally) for defamation. We must put a stop to its chilling effect.’ The journalists spoke of the professional and personal toll of being pursued through the courts by rich and powerful claimants. Boris Johnson, who had long cultivated ‘Londongrad’, now claimed that ‘for the oligarchs and super-rich who can afford these sky-high costs, the threat of legal action has become a new kind of lawfare. It was occasioned less by concern for freedom of the press than by political discomfort at Britain’s reputation as an international laundromat in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The consultation had been launched a few weeks earlier by the deputy prime minister, Dominic Raab. Nothing would be attributed, we were assured, but our comments could be used to inform a consultation on reforming the law to prevent Slapp cases. I was ushered into a small, airless room with a group of other journalists and civil servants. , I was invited to the Ministry of Justice to take part in a discussion of ‘Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation’ (Slapps): legal cases whose purpose is to harass, intimidate and silence public criticism.
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