UK libel law has turned the country into a haven for transnational repression, allowing states to
silence exiles.

I am a former British Police officer. UK law generally leans in favour of the person defending. In libel law this is different, it leans in favour of the claimant, the accuser. This means that in Britain, if you are accused of libel you have to prove that you are telling the truth rather than the claimant having to prove you lied.

This has allowed the UK’s libel law to be used to suppress free speech. This is what is happening to my colleague (and fellow NUJ member) Major (ret.) Adil Farooq Raja.

Raja served in Pakistan’s military for 21 years before becoming a whistleblower. He now works as a journalist living in exile in London.

He is under attack through a SLAPP lawsuit, a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation brought against him by Brigadier (ret.) Rashid Naseer, who is a senior intelligence officer in the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency.

Raja accused Naseer of electoral manipulation, judicial control over Lahore’s High Court and attempting to influence Punjab’s elections. The control of political life by Pakistan’s military and intelligence branches of the state is well recorded. Former Director for South Asia of the US National Security Council Philip Reiner writes in The Cipher Brief that the ISI: “today represents the defining example of a ‘deep state.’”

The purpose of SLAPP lawsuits is not to win the case, instead it is to deter scrutiny through
enormous financial expense and the UK’s laws are perfect for this.

Defending a case like this in the UK is expensive. Raja states that it has cost him over £100,000 or
38,559,550 rupees to defend and the case is not yet over.

Raja’s case is the latest in a long line. Tom Burgis and the Financial Times were sued by a Kazakh
mining company after reporting on allegations of corruption and murder. The case was dismissed
but it still cost £340,000. If it had not been dismissed it could have cost upwards of £1 million.

There is also no filter on who can bring a SLAPP case. Yevgeny Prigozhin, founder of Russia’s Wagner Group, the mercenary company infamous for their human rights abuses in Ukraine (which included executing a former member with a sledgehammer) started a SLAPP lawsuit in the British courts. He was under British sanctions at the time.

He sued British journalist Eliot Higgins. The case was dismissed after Russia invaded Ukraine but it still cost Higgins £70,000. Just before the birth of his first child. 

The Foreign Policy Centre think tank found in a 2020 survey that those reporting outside the UK on corruption or financial crime face nearly as many threats of legal action from courts in England as from all other European nations combined.

SLAPP lawsuits throttle free speech and run contrary to Britain’s assertion that we are a free
democracy.