Truth or Business Interests: Who Wants to Silence Journalists with SLAPPs?

Аuthor: Slobodanka Jovanovska

Physical attacks, insults, humiliation, threats, online violence and defamation lawsuits – these are everyday occurrences for journalists in Macedonia. Although the country has a very high ranking this year in terms of media freedom (38^th out of 180), and the penalties for defamation and insult have been drastically reduced and a special public prosecutor is appointed to safeguard the rights of journalists, there is still an evident tendency to revert to some past times when the media were being gagged. What brought journalists to their feet these days was the verdict pronounced for the Investigative Reporting Lab (IRL) in the dispute with businessman Kocho Angjushev, in which IRL’s status as a media outlet was challenged, stating that its journalists are “so-called journalists”, that their work cannot be public and that state institutions should reexamine their work, leaving the option to ban them.

Such a verdict raised suspicions that there is an evolution in finding ways to silence journalists and that it is not a question of individual cases, but of strategically designed attacks against those who dare to write about high corruption. Businessmen, politicians, institutions, some PR agencies, even other media outlets participate in those attacks, the main objective being to undermine journalists’ positions by calling them “extortionists”, to intimidate them, to exhaust them mentally and financially, even physically, wasting their time on court proceedings and dealing with announcements and attacks on social media, and the ultimate goal is for journalists to ask themselves – is that investigative story even worth writing?

This intimidation tactic, which applies not only to journalists but also to bloggers, independent institutions, non-governmental organizations, activists and all those who express themselves on social media has been officially named Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP) and it is becoming a worrying trend in Europe, and apparently it is gaining momentum in our country as well.

– They are not suing us for money…Kocho Angjushev, for example, asked for 2 euros in damages. The goal is to discredit us, to destroy our reputation, says Sashka Cvetkovska from IRL.

IRL is currently facing eight ongoing court proceedings, five of which were initiated by a businessman, a foreign investor in Macedonia. The general conclusion is that the main pressure now comes from the business elite, and less from the political one.

– They do it through a group of media, including some mainstream media, which they pay to be able to run smear campaigns. Lawsuits are just an excuse to do that. Entire bot armies of the two largest political parties are at their disposal, aimed to insult us, call us extortionists, all kinds of names… We respond to these kinds of attacks on a daily basis. Instead of creating content, we spend half our time responding to this kind of attacks. Because it is not only the lawsuit, for which there are five hearings a year. There is not a month in which “Feroinvest” does not publish at least three announcements against us, calling us the most derogatory names, and that is very exhausting, very offensive and very stressful, Cvetkovska says. In one of the announcements, IRL was accused of “false constructions and monstrous ideas” with the assessment that they are a “cancer” for the healthy fabric of society.

According to her, the most worrying thing is that it is not only the IRL who are the target of attacks for their investigations, but also their donors who are under unprecedented pressure to stop funding them. The fact that no political party, small or large, has come out with a statement in defence of freedom of speech, except for president Stevo Pendarovski, is an indication for Cvetkovska that they are not bothered by such attacks.

– We have practically no support from the institutions, so the oligarchs, businessmen and criminals are free to harass us. And we constantly receive threats of lawsuits and actual lawsuits. They threaten us even when we ask a question, before we publish anything at all. And those pressures are not only on journalists, but also on independent institutions that are under pressure not to give us information, which gives me reason to believe that it is a matter of strategic attacks from multiple sides with the same goal, to silence journalists, Cvetkovska says.

At the same time, she points to the paradox of state institutions and public companies suing the Commission for Access to Information, which should fight for the right to obtain public information, for ruling in favour of IRL’s requests to provide them with the requested data. This year, they submitted 40 complaints about denial of data, because the responses of the institutions are becoming more and more reduced. She says that the State Commission for Prevention of Corruption (SCPC) is also under pressure because it quoted segments of an audit report at its meetings. All that, according to her, has a very discouraging effect, especially on young journalists.

– We are trying to create personnel. Journalists are underpaid and all they have is enthusiasm and the feeling that someone in society values what they do. Our young journalists work for that satisfaction, and now they are being intimidated, Cvetkoska says.

Irena Mulachka from Fokus, a weekly magazine and a portal, faced a lawsuit from Orce Kamchev due to a series of stories about the work of “Beton”.

– There were eight ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and construction has not yet started, she points to one of the reasons for the lawsuit, which was rejected by the judge after three hearings. According to her, the pressures were not direct, but came through an underground network of portals that published offensive stories about alleged personal affairs, about taking money (bribes) from a wholesaler to write in their favour, etc.

– Zhan Mitrev threatens with a lawsuit when all you’ve done is ask him a question, Mulachka says, adding that the last threat of a lawsuit that she received was announced with a 50-page rebuttal, and it refers to an investigative story about the issuing of diplomas at the Faculty of Medicine in Shtip.

She isolates herself from the pressures so that they don’t affect her work because, as she says, they want to “tire us out”, but there were times, until 2014, when they self- censored due to pressures, because at that time, Fokus was facing 14 lawsuits from high-ranking politicians and businessmen with thousands of euros in claims for damages. As the most characteristic experience, she indicated the case with the embezzlement of medicines in the Oncology Clinic. After the publication of that story, one of the people mentioned in it gave her the following offer: “Say that the story was refuted, you will reduce your damages”, as an obvious threat of a lawsuit.

Meri Jordanovska, as a journalist on the web portal A1on, in 2020, asked the MP and leader of The Left (Levica), Dimitar Apasiev, how his party intends to spend the budget money and whether they are planning to return it to the budget. That caused a dozen offensive and denigrating Facebook posts of Apasiev that culminated in a lawsuit after she made them public. In them, among other things, Apasiev asks: “When you ask SDS, do you call Zaev directly or the Communications Centre? I’ve always treated both Soros-whores and Kurir-adjacents fairly, but you must have a level of professionalism.”

The lawsuit submitted to the Basic Criminal Court was qualified as “unauthorized publication of personal records” under Article 148 of the Criminal Code. Namely, the MP believed that a screenshot of his answer to a question posed via text message by a journalist is a “personal record”.

– According to Article 148 of the Criminal Code, if we were found guilty, we would have faced a fine or a prison sentence of up to one year, Jordanovska points out.

The lawsuit was directed against her, against the journalist who wrote the text, and against A1on’s editor-in-chief Predrag Petrović and A1on’s publishing company.

– It was more than evident that it was a SLAPP for two reasons – first, the lawsuit came from a person who is in office (a member of the Parliament) and in addition, his attorney clearly indicated that after the verdict he will seek damages in a civil procedure. I believe that all this entire ordeal and distress was with the sole purpose of financially draining the media outlet and instilling fear in journalists, so they stop mentioning Apasiev’s name in a negative connotation, Jordanovska says.

After almost two years of being dragged through the courts, the case was closed, but in the meantime, reactions came from all domestic associations, AJM, SSNM, the international associations Reporters Without Borders and the International Federation of Journalists.

– That gave me a motive not to give the plaintiff the satisfaction he was looking for, because I knew that I had done nothing wrong and for that I had the full support of my colleagues. Despite the fact that in the end, in a way, we “found ourselves free”, we still lost two years in courts. Just the phrase they use in the court “Will the defendant please rise”, makes you feel humiliated, demeaned, underestimated, and all I have done is my job within all professional and ethical standards. Yet, I am in the dock because someone’s ego was hurt. I am sorry to admit that during those two years while the trial was ongoing, I did not write a single text mentioning Apasiev’s name – not because I was afraid of him, but because I did not want my texts to be seen as of a kind of “revenge” because he is suing me, Jordanovska says.

She was shocked by the decision of the Appellate Court to remand this case, after an acquittal, and she believes that as much as journalists need training in relation to the work of judicial instances, judges need the same amount of training in relation to journalistic work and journalistic standards.

– From this perspective, I think that the courts do not have much experience for this type of lawsuits and what is considered as public interest. I found myself in a situation of having to justify myself and explain things that are elementary for the journalistic profession – that every day we contact politicians, officials, members of political parties and many other public figures on the phone, social media, communication apps, etc., without knowing (because it is completely irrelevant) whether the mobile number is in their name or it is government-issued. Every public figure has the opportunity to say that they refuse to answer, that they do not want to answer, that they will answer without being quoted, etc., but such a rude reaction when a journalist politely asks a question is unacceptable, Jordanovska points out.

Sashka Cvetkovska also agrees that judges do not know how to adjudicate when it comes to media freedom.

– Judges are completely uneducated to adjudicate on freedom of speech. That type of education should not last three days, but should be serious because human rights and media freedom are sensitive matters, she says.

Mulachka, on the other hand, says that she had to explain elementary things about the way in which the media work during the trials, where she was asked whether she got permission from the defendant to publish his photo on the front page. “Practically, I had to explain to them what our job is, that it cannot be expected to ask everyone for permission whether to publish a photo or not for fifty published news stories per day,” she says. The abuse of SLAPPs has already mobilized the European Union, which passed a regulation requiring them to be dismissed at an early stage and states to provide national legislation to prevent powerful people from intimidating and pressuring journalists. The Council of Europe is working on a similar regulation and it should be adopted by the end of the year. After this type of lawsuit became a trend, in the last three years a register of SLAPPs was created, including five registered cases from Macedonia. CASE, the Coalition against SLAPPs in Europe, assessed that threats to democracy are growing and that the number of lawsuits against journalists has increased drastically, so, compared to 135 SLAPPs in Europe in 2021, 570 were registered last year, and 820 this year, where the average damages sought by the plaintiffs who are businessmen, politicians or corporations, is 15,000 euros per case. Although in some countries there are no such lawsuits because there are very few media outlets that aren’t held captive (Hungary for example), they still confirm the threatened freedom of the media. Considering population numbers, Malta is at the top in terms of the number of lawsuits, but in general, the most SLAPPs are registered in Poland, and from the region Croatia is the “champion”, which is worse off than Serbia even, while in Montenegro no SLAPPs have been registered.

The organization Article 19 assessed that there is a clear general trend of journalists being attacked with SLAPPs in almost all the countries they investigated in Europe and that none of them have regulations on this issue. Depending on national legislation, there are cases where journalists are prohibited from doing investigative work while the trial is ongoing, and once it is over, it is no longer relevant. SLAPPs are often hidden behind defamation lawsuits, which is a crime in six European countries, and in one of them you can go to jail for it. Regardless of the numbers and practices, one thing is common to all of them – they are activated when high corruption or bad governance is investigated, and the excuse is that “their reputation is ruined”.

The main pressures in Macedonia nowadays, according to journalists, do not come so much from politics, as they come from business, although, according to Cvetkovska, there is an evident connection between politicians, businessmen and the judiciary. Thus, in addition to the growing number of attacks against journalists (from 59 last year to 79 this year), journalists have become the target of ridicule and disparagement, and political parties wage their battles against them through their own media outlets, determining who is a journalist and who is not. The difference compared to previous times, she assesses, is only that now the attacks do not come from one centre – but from several.

This article was prepared within the project "Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) are a slap in the face to citizens and the public interest", supported by UNESCO. The designations employed and the presentation of material throughout this article do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever on the part of UNESCO concerning the legal status of any country, territory, city or area or its authorities, or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers or boundaries. The authors are responsible for the choice and the presentation of the facts contained in this article and for the opinions expressed therein, which are not necessarily those of UNESCO and do not commit the Organization.