Daphne Caruana Galizia’s son Andrew Caruana Galizia has lambasted the EU’s watershed anti-SLAPP law as insufficient.

“In reality, the proposal as it stands would not have helped my mother in any of her cases,” he told Politico’s EU Confidential podcast.

Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was killed in a car bomb on 16 October, 2017, faced 43 civil and five criminal lawsuits at the time of her death.

In recent years, the EU has seen a rise in SLAPPs: unfounded cases brought against journalists, activists or other public figures, often by wealthy and powerful people, which explicitly aim to stifle free speech and kill legitimate investigation or criticism. Unfounded cases place a massive financial burden on the defendant and act as a deterrent for others to pursue such work, Politico reports.

“The aim of these lawsuits is to deprive the target of time and resources, and to deter others from taking up the same story,” said Andrew Caruana Galizia. For the person who brings the legal case, “a SLAPP is effective if it never ends. The most effective kind of vexatious and frivolous lawsuit is one that drags on forever and ever — and in my mother’s case, until beyond her grave.”

See report here