What, exactly, will it take for the government to finally do something about the harassment that the country’s media is being subjected to time and time again by well-funded business interests?

What will it take for the government to take action against one of the biggest threats to the country’s free media and protect the interests of citizens and the well being of its democracy?

Perhaps that day will come when one of the government’s friendly media is attacked in such an outrageous and undemocratic fashion as we and others have been.  Such was certainly the case for The Shift News this week, which has found itself in the crosshairs of a Russian banker taking objection to its reportage.

At this stage it is quite irrelevant what the story was or who it was that is threatening such a lawsuit, and we will not delve into those particular merits.  At this stage, what matters is that foreign SLAPP lawsuits are still being be leveraged against the Maltese media and Maltese people in foreign lands.

SLAPPs - Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPP) – are intended solely to censor, intimidate, and silence critics such as the media by burdening them with an excessively costly legal defence until they abandon their criticism. The aim of such lawsuits is not necessarily to secure a legal victory, but, rather, to prevent the media from exercising its right and sacrosanct duty to inform the public about matters of public interest.

They have been employed time and time again by some of the nastier foreign elements doing business in Malta, and with the government.

But in the meantime, we have a justice minister who says outlawing SLAPPs would go against EU policy, but then we have an EU justice commissioner saying quite the opposite, and actually calling on Malta to do something about these obscene means of gagging the press.

And the thing is that it was only a week ago that the European Parliament’s Financial Crimes Committee stepped in to demand that member states outlaw SLAPPs completely, something the Maltese government, rather unfathomably, continues to claim to be impossible.

Malta’s libel laws are capped at around €11,000 for a very good reason, because they are in line with the rather limited economies of scale that plague this country on so many levels.  As an example, million-pound libel suits are not unheard of in London but they are in Valletta.  And that is because The Malta Independent, or any other Maltese media house, cannot even hold a candle to the Fleet Street titles in terms of revenues or sales.

The recent Media and Defamation Bill had done away with various criminal provisions such as criminal libel and other ancillary criminal offences that serve to curb freedom of journalistic expression such as precautionary warrants against journalists and with the practice of filing multiple law suits against a journalist on basically the same facts. Libel damages also remained unchanged and capped.

But what Parliament has not found the gumption to do was to find a way to protect our democracy by agreeing with the opposition on a way to prohibit a person from suing the Maltese media in a foreign court.

The government’s argument is that the Maltese courts could at a later stage turn around and rule that a foreign judgment granting large amounts in damages would be unenforceable in Malta for public policy reasons.

But even if there were a hard and fast law about such matters, the fact of the matter is still that Maltese media houses cannot even afford to fight the lawsuits in the first place, which is the whole points behind a SLAPP, to slap the media into silence and submission.

And the government’s continued inaction on SLAPPs is a continual slap in the face of not just the media, but of the entire country which does not deserve to have such information and stories buried under reams of legal threats from top-flight London lawyers.