As founder of the investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat, I know the impact of Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) well: I’ve been on the receiving end in relation to my work investigating the world’s richest and most powerful people.
The acronym describes legal action that weaponises the justice system to restrict public interest speech. SLAPPs have been lodged against investigative journalists, campaigners seeking to expose wrongdoing, survivors of sexual and gender-based violence and many more members of civil society.
In December 2021, I found myself at the blunt end of a SLAPP claim launched by the late Russian oligarch Yevgeny Viktorovich Prigozhin. I was sued by Prigozhin for defamation over a handful of tweets about his links to the private military company, Wagner Group. At the time that I posted the tweets, Prigozhin had already been sanctioned by the United Kingdom, European Union and the United States, including over his connections to Wagner.
The tweets linked to articles by CNN, Der Spiegel and Bellingcat, and contained no new accusations. And yet, Prigozhin’s lawyers were able to get the case off the ground. A British citizen was being sued in a British court, by a sanctioned Russian warlord, for saying what the British government had already said. And crucially, Discreet Law, a British law firm, was leading the case.
In the fight for freedom of speech against SLAPPs, the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition, alongside others, has argued that the role of law firms in these cases needs further scrutiny. To date, despite several disciplinary tribunal proceedings, no individual lawyer or firm has been found by the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) to have ultimately breached their obligations related to SLAPPs. And a recent ruling from the High Court threatens to set efforts for accountability back even further. On the 21st September, the court held that the SRA would no longer have the power to access legally privileged materials when investigating complaints, a change that the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition say will render the body “toothless”.
My own experience with the SRA illustrates how limited its purview was even before this ruling. In March 2022, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Discreet Law withdrew their services from Prigozhin. The case against me collapsed when, in May 2022, Prigozhin’s claim was struck out after he failed to comply with the court’s orders. In September, Prigozhin publicly admitted he had been Wagner’s founder, but by then my legal fees had amounted to roughly £70,000, and I had no realistic prospect of recovering a penny of it from a sanctioned individual—a prospect that ended for good with Prigozhin’s death in August 2023.
In May 2022, I complained to the SRA: Prigozhin’s case had all the hallmarks of a textbook SLAPP from the beginning. Later that year, the SRA published a warning notice on SLAPPs, to help lawyers understand their obligations and how to comply with them, while also encouraging those who believed they had been targeted with a SLAPP to raise a complaint about the conduct of a lawyer or firm. But in this case, nearly two years after I had lodged the initial complaint the SRA decided against any further action.
“While there was public speculation surrounding Mr Prigozhin’s connection with the Wagner Group, there was no evidence to suggest the firm were aware, or should have been aware, that the instructions they received were false,” the SRA said in a letter to Baroness Stowell, a former leader of the House of Lords, who had written to the regulator asking for an explanation. However, not everyone can benefit from a peer’s intervention to get the transparency they require.
For a regulatory body to be trusted, it cannot operate inside a black box. As noted by the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition, the SRA is inconsistent regarding how it reports how many SLAPPs reports it has received. In its 2024/25 annual report it states that “[s]ince 2022, we have received approximately 300 reports about abusive litigation, some raising allegations of SLAPPs, and have proceeded to formal investigation in 97 cases. Of these, 31 remain open.” However, we do not know how many of these were allegations of SLAPPs, nor the frequency of complaints being made, as the SRA does not publish this data on a regular or consistent basis.
The UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition also has concerns about the SRA’s decision-making, having seen legal letters where people have been threatened by solicitors with police investigations, bankruptcy and even jail time for speaking out. In one letter, a law firm invoked their intellectual property rights to threaten legal action against a campaigner if they shared or published the letter, making them too fearful to seek support from their MP. This is not an unfounded fear given the coalition’s experiences with another case where a legal letter was sent to someone after they emailed their MP. In each of these cases, the complaints were not progressed by the SRA. Several SLAPP targets who have spoken to the coalition report years of waiting for an outcome. Many have simply given up. Prospect approached the SRA for comment on these claims, but they declined to respond.
Both Bellingcat and the UK Anti-SLAPP Coalition have benefited from the work, generosity and creativity of legal professionals in the UK and further afield. But we need the SRA to dust itself off and ensure those who have been sued into silence can depend on it. As the SRA prepares for its appeal to the Supreme Court to reclaim its power to access privileged materials, I urge it to be proactive, ambitious and transparent so it can hold the profession to account. How the SRA proceeds from here will shape more than the legal landscape. It will determine whether freedom of expression is protected in this country.
This article was co-written by Nik Williams, co-chair of the UK Anti SLAPP Coalition
