There are "serious gaps and deficiencies" in Malta's anti-SLAPP law, the Liberties Media Freedom Report 2025 has read.

The annual report on media freedom in the EU is produced by the Civil Liberties Union for Europe (Liberties).

Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation (SLAPPs) are abusive lawsuits which aim to intimidate and harass the target into silence.

While an EU anti-SLAPP directive has to be transposed by Member States by 7 May 2026, the report acknowledged that so far only Malta has fully transposed the legislation into national law, but also says that "there are serious gaps and deficiencies in its bill."

"In August 2024, the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation, together with other civil society organisations (CSOs), wrote to the Prime Minister and Ministry of Justice highlighting these short comings; the CSOs received no response and were not consulted prior to final passage of the legislation. Because of the law's shortcomings, the CSOs consider that no substantive progress has been made towards protecting Maltese journalists and activists against SLAPPs," the report reads.

The anti-SLAPP law in Malta has been criticised for not going far enough by various organisations. In their letter, the Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation, Repubblika and the aditus Foundation had said that in its haste for Malta to be the first Member State to transpose the Directive, "the country that inspired the creation of Daphne's Law has missed the opportunity to provide comprehensive protection and to set a positive example for other countries," highlighting that the directive had laid down minimum standards for Member States, and that the law only covers SLAPP cases with cross-border implications. They had, among other things, said that the anti-SLAPP legislation lacks critical safeguards against domestic SLAPP cases.

The Nationalist Party had later proposed amendments to the law, including for the country's anti-SLAPP laws to apply both to cases involving other countries and to cases filed solely in Malta, but these were shot down by the government, which had substituted the text of the motion, with text which recognised that Malta was the first to introduce the EU's anti-SLAPP directive and encouraged the government to hold further consultations on laws which are currently on Parliament's agenda.

Justin Borg-Barthet an expert in legislation aimed at preventing SLAPPs and a professor of law at the University of Aberdeen, had previously told The Malta Independent on Sunday that "the Maltese implementation is a minimum implementation. Insofar as the EU legislation is a significant improvement on the absence of legislation, then the Maltese legislation equally is a sound contribution to the legal landscape of freedom of expression in Malta." However, Borg-Barthet said, "it was a very rushed process. There was no consultation on the specific draft and there was no attempt to go beyond the bare minimum". He said that the government had time to adopt primary legislation to implement that directive, but instead chose to adopt that legislation through a legal notice. "What they were able to do through a legal notice is transpose what there is in the directive, and while there is a margin of appreciation, they cannot go significantly beyond that on the basis of that authority. To take it further, a serious process of consultation would have been required, drawing on the best elements of the EU directive, the recommendations from the Council of Europe and the EU Commission, along with international best practices. With that, one might have expected the removal of the distinction between domestic and cross-border cases, because Malta has not legislated on purely domestic SLAPPs."

The Liberties Media Freedom Report 2025 discusses legislative and regulatory action at EU and national level during 2024, and maps the main trends and developments in media freedom in 21 EU Member States, including in Malta. The report is based on input from organisations in the Liberties network and complements its annual Rule of Law Report.  The data and information provided comes from its own research and from its member and partner organisations through their rule of law country reports, it states. The Daphne Caruana Galizia Foundation contributed to the report.

The report also mentions Malta on a number of other issues.

Among them, it makes mention of the State Broadcaster. It reads that the editorial line of Malta's Public Broadcast Service (PBS) "is not free of political interference, with much of the reporting peppered with bias towards the party in government. The report ing frequently lacks depth, with some articles no more than a sentence or two in length, and important news stories are sometimes pushed to the bottom of the news website so that headlines do not put the government in a bad light."

It also spoke of the 'establishment' statements made by Prime Minister Robert Abela last year. The report reads that the governing party in Malta "continues to foster a hostile environment" against journalists, "with the Prime Minister and other public officials attacking journalists for simply doing their job. In May (2024), Prime Minister Abela accused journalists and their outlets of working for the so-called 'establishment'. The Institute of Maltese Journalists had to issue two statements, as Abela was 'clearly implying that they are enemies of the state and the people'."

Elsewhere in the report, it also makes reference to the 2021 public inquiry report into Daphne Caruana Galizia's assassination, saying that it cited impunity as one of the factors enabling Daphne's killing. "Four years later, most of the report's recommendations have yet to be implemented."

Regarding State advertising, it says that as of the close of 2024, the Maltese government had made no attempt to create a more fair and transparent system for the allocation of state advertising. "Proposals that were presented by the Commissioner of Standards in Public Life back in 2021 continue to be ignored." It reads that information about the allocation of state advertising for media outlets is not publicly available and that there is no legislation that regulates the process.

Among other things, the report also mentioned spoofing of websites. "Online newsrooms were the victims of multiple attacks. For instance, in June 2024, MaltaToday and The Malta Independent reported that they were victims of a scam website imitating them in an attempt to deceive individuals with a get-rich-quick scheme. On 6 February 2024, the website of the Times of Malta was targeted with a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack, which made the website temporarily inaccessible to readers. According to the newspaper, the motive of the attack was unclear, and no ransom request, data breach or other threats were reported."

Liberties describes itself as a watchdog that safeguards the human rights of everyone in the European Union. "Our team is made up of experts in human rights and communications. We work closely with our network of members in Brussels and across 18 EU countries. We are registered as a non-governmental organisation in Berlin and have a presence in Brussels," its website says.