Anti-SLAPP laws are rules, at the national, regional, or state level, designed to give people a way to get out of these abusive lawsuits quickly, before the financial damage becomes irreversible. The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press describes them as laws intended to stop people from using courts to intimidate those exercising their right to free expression. According to the Institute for Free Speech, the median cost of defeating a typical meritless defamation lawsuit in court is $39,000, but legal fees can easily run into the millions. Anti-SLAPP laws exist to cut that process short.
A strong anti-SLAPP law typically includes three key elements:
- Early dismissal, the person being sued can ask a court to throw out the case at an early stage, before the most expensive part of the legal process begins.
- A pause in proceedings, while that request is being considered, the rest of the case stops, preventing the plaintiff from using costly legal demands to wear the defendant down in the meantime.
- Fee reversal, if the court decides the lawsuit is a SLAPP, the person who filed it must pay the legal costs of the person they sued. This is a financial deterrent against filing abusive cases.
Not all anti-SLAPP laws are equal. As the Reporters Committee notes, some laws only protect speech related to government proceedings, while others broadly cover any public expression on a matter of public concern. The difference matters enormously for journalists, activists, and anyone else speaking out on issues that do not involve a government body.
The United States
According to the Institute for Free Speech’s 2025 Anti-SLAPP Report Card, 40 states and the District of Columbia now have some form of anti-SLAPP law. However, 12 states still have no functioning protection, and the quality of existing laws varies widely.
One of the most significant recent developments is the rapid spread of the Uniform Public Expression Protection Act (UPEPA), a model law drafted by the Uniform Law Commission in 2020 to give states a strong, consistent framework. According to the Reporters Committee, adoption has accelerated significantly, with South Dakota becoming the 16th state to adopt it in March 2026.
Iowa’s adoption in May 2025 had an immediate real-world impact: as documented by Wikipedia’s SLAPP entry, the new law forced former President Donald Trump to drop his federal lawsuit against the Des Moines Register, widely considered a SLAPP, and refile it at the state level, where protections now apply.
Despite this state-level progress, there is still no federal anti-SLAPP law in the United States. When a lawsuit is filed in federal court, state-level anti-SLAPP protections do not always apply. As the American Bar Association explains, federal circuits are deeply divided on the issue, meaning a journalist may lose access to their state’s protections the moment a case crosses into the federal system.
This inconsistency enables forum shopping, where SLAPP filers deliberately choose the court system that offers the least protection to their target. The Freedom of the Press Foundation has identified this as a critical loophole. The SLAPP Back Initiative found that federal courts are among the most common venues for SLAPP-related litigation nationwide, making the absence of a federal law especially damaging.
A bipartisan bill called the Free Speech Protection Act, introduced by Senator Ron Wyden and Representatives Jamie Raskin and Kevin Kiley, would create a federal anti-SLAPP mechanism modeled on UPEPA. As reported by the Reporters Committee, it would allow defendants to request early dismissal within 60 days and pause all other proceedings in the meantime. As of this writing, no federal anti-SLAPP law has been enacted.
Europe
Europe has seen the most significant recent legislative progress on SLAPPs. The Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE) identified at least 1,049 SLAPP cases across the continent between 2010 and 2023, and the true number is likely far higher, since many cases go unreported.
The watershed moment came with the 2017 assassination of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was facing dozens of lawsuits at the time of her death. Her case catalyzed a decade of advocacy that ultimately led to the adoption of Directive (EU) 2024/1069, also known as “Daphne’s Law”, which entered into force on 6 May 2024. The Directive requires EU member states to provide procedural safeguards for journalists and human rights defenders targeted by abusive lawsuits, including early dismissal and fee reversal. Member states have until May 2026 to incorporate it into their national laws, though as ClientEarth notes, progress among member states has been slow.
The Directive has important limitations: it currently only covers cases with cross-border implications, meaning purely domestic SLAPP cases, which represent over 90% of all cases, according to Global Freedom of Expression at Columbia University, fall outside its scope. Countries like Belgium are already proposing model laws that go further than the Directive requires, extending protections to domestic cases as well.
In parallel, the Council of Europe adopted Recommendation CM/Rec(2024)2 on countering SLAPPs, providing non-binding guidance to its 46 member states, including those outside the EU.
In the United Kingdom, progress has been slower. The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 introduced limited anti-SLAPP protections, but only for cases related to economic crimes such as corruption or embezzlement. Broader protections have repeatedly stalled: legislation to extend anti-SLAPP coverage to all cases did not pass before the 2024 general election, and as of June 2026, two separate anti-SLAPP Private Members’ Bills have been introduced in Parliament, one in the Commons and one in the Lords, but no comprehensive law is yet in place. This gap matters particularly because, as a Foreign Policy Centre survey of investigative journalists from 41 countries found, the UK is the most frequent country of origin for cross-border legal threats, nearly as high as the EU and US combined.
Canada
Canada has some of the strongest anti-SLAPP laws in the world at the provincial level. According to the Centre for Free Expression at Toronto Metropolitan University, Ontario and British Columbia rank among the top five strongest anti-SLAPP jurisdictions globally, alongside New York, Texas, and California. Ontario’s Protection of Public Participation Act (2015) is widely regarded as a model for other jurisdictions, requiring plaintiffs to demonstrate that the harm caused by the expression outweighs the public interest in protecting it.
However, Canada still lacks a federal anti-SLAPP law, leaving provinces without their own legislation, and journalists working across provincial lines with uneven protection.
Asia-Pacific
The Asia-Pacific region remains one of the most vulnerable regions for journalists and activists facing abusive litigation. As media law expert Barbara Swann documented for the International Lawyers Project, civil society actors in Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia continue to face criminal and civil defamation suits for exposing misconduct, with no anti-SLAPP framework explicitly protecting public participation.
In the Philippines, Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa was convicted of “cyberlibel” in 2020 after her outlet Rappler reported on alleged corruption, a case widely described as a SLAPP. In Vietnam, journalist Trương Huy San was arrested in June 2024 under vague charges of “abusing democratic freedoms,” a charge routinely used to silence dissent.
In Australia, only the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) has a formal anti-SLAPP mechanism, and its limited scope and weak enforcement offer little practical protection to most defendants.
Latin America and Africa
SLAPPs are not concentrated in the Global North. A Business and Human Rights Resource Centre report examining 355 SLAPP cases found that 73% were brought in countries in the Global South, including Latin America (39%), Asia-Pacific (25%), Europe and Central Asia (18%), Africa (8.5%), and North America (9%).
In Latin America, journalists covering corruption and organized crime are particularly vulnerable. Ecuador’s former President Rafael Correa won a $40 million libel judgment against the newspaper El Universo, and the journalist at the center of the case was initially sentenced to prison, though both the fine and sentence were later pardoned. According to ARTICLE 19 research on Mexico and Colombia, legal harassment against journalists frequently occurs alongside physical violence, making SLAPPs part of a broader and more dangerous pattern of intimidation.
In many of these regions, as the Al Jazeera Media Institute documents, existing laws not only fail to protect journalists, but they also actively enable attacks on free expression, with broadly worded defamation and “false information” statutes weaponized against reporters.
The global picture
Taken together, the data paints a clear picture: SLAPPs are a global tool of suppression, and legal protection against them remains deeply uneven. While Europe is making significant legislative progress and parts of North America have strong state and provincial protections, vast regions of the world, including much of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, have little or no meaningful defense for journalists, activists, and citizens targeted by abusive litigation.
The Open Government Partnership has noted that it is hoped the EU Directive and Council of Europe standards will have a “ripple effect” beyond Europe. But until meaningful protection reaches every jurisdiction, the power imbalance between well-resourced plaintiffs and the journalists and citizens they target will continue to make SLAPPs one of the most effective tools for silencing the press worldwide.
A Global Problem in Practice
Legal protections matter, but even in jurisdictions where they exist, many SLAPP cases never reach a courtroom at all. The mere threat of a lawsuit, sent through a lawyer’s letter, is often enough to make a journalist or news outlet remove a story or stay silent on an issue. The Global Investigative Journalism Network has documented this pattern widely, noting that what journalists are unable to publish can be just as damaging to the public interest as that which is actively censored.
A 2022 report by ARTICLE 19 documented SLAPP cases across Europe, finding they were overwhelmingly brought by politicians, business figures, and corporations. In some countries, the threat includes not just financial ruin but criminal defamation charges that can result in imprisonment, making the stakes for targeted journalists even higher.
According to the International Lawyers Project, over 2,000 SLAPP cases have been launched globally since 2010, and that figure almost certainly underestimates the true scale, since the vast majority of cases that are dropped after a threat is made, or settled in silence, never appear in any database.