Human rights defenders are at the forefront of peacefully promoting and protecting our human rights, natural resources, and shared planet, as well as playing a vital role in calling out the harm created by irresponsible business practices. Protecting these defenders’ freedom of expression and association is crucial to our democracies, transparency in markets, and protection of workers and communities.

Every day across the globe, defenders who bravely speak out against injustice face a range of attacks for the mere reason of raising concerns about human rights risks and harms associated with business practices. Strategic lawsuits against public participation, criminal or civil lawsuits brought or initiated by business actors to intimidate critics, are one form of attack that defenders face. The tactic can drain the resources of community members, environmental advocates, and journalists who speak out in support of human rights and the environment and have a broader chilling effect, deterring others from speaking out against risks or abuse.

Methodology

In this research, we consider each individual or organisation sued as a “case” when the name is publicly available. For example, if a lawsuit was brought against seven individuals, but only one person’s name is shared through public sources, we’ve counted this as only one case. If the names of all seven individuals were publicly shared, this would be counted as seven cases. Our dataset includes cases filed from January 1, 2015 – November 2022, as this aligns with the period during which the Resource Centre has tracked attacks against human rights defenders. However, we recognise that many SLAPPs were filed before 2015 and so our research provides a limited picture of the full scale of SLAPPs.

This research is based on a review of media sources, NGO reports and websites, and social media posts in English, Spanish and French. In order for a case to be included in this research, it must have been reported in at least two reliable sources and met the definition used for this research. In some cases, additional information was sought from civil society organisations and human rights defenders directly.