Feature story - August 6, 2010
(Toronto) Greenpeace has filed a submission with Ontario’s Advisory Panel on Anti-SLAPP Legislation calling for strong protection of the right of citizens to engage in public debate, including peaceful public protests.
SLAPP stands for strategic lawsuit against public participation. It is a tool increasingly used by large corporations in Canada to silence and intimidate opposition to corporate activities, such as environmental destruction and other activities.
The Ontario government set up the advisory panel, chaired by Dean Mayo Moran of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, to provide advice on key issues related to anti-SLAPP legislation. The panel is consulting with the public and is scheduled to provide its advice to the Ontario Attorney-General by September 30, 2010. Quebec and more than half the U.S. states already have anti-SLAPP legislation.
Corporations try to silence and intimidate individuals and organizations, such as Greenpeace, by filing lawsuits that are grossly disproportionate to any damages caused by a peaceful activity against them. Even if a SLAPP suit never goes to court, corporations win by draining resources needed by activists and their organizations to fight against corporate power.
The Greenpeace submission makes the case that effective anti-SLAPP legislation must include strong protections for individuals and organizations that engage in peaceful protest on public issues, even if the peaceful protests might in some cases involve unlawful activities. For example, legislation must protect protesting individuals and organizations from SLAPP suits if they trespass on the property of a large corporation to hold up banners and highlight concerns. Trespass issues in such a case are properly addressed through the criminal courts, not civil courts as they would be in a SLAPP suit.
The Greenpeace submission notes that many of the important reforms that have significantly improved democracy and civil rights sprang out of the peaceful protests of such luminary leaders as Mahatma Gandhi, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr.
The submission requests that the panel give serious consideration to recommending that anti-SLAPP legislation:
- protect the rights of citizens to freedom of expression and assembly entrenched in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms;
- uphold equal participation in the public arena by extending this protection to organizations representing activists;
- uphold substantive rights to freedom of expression and assembly against private parties such as wealthy corporations;
- ensure the government fulfills its responsibility to include non-violent direct action and peaceful protest as rights under freedom of expression and assembly in Ontario anti-SLAPP legislation;
- make a defendant’s rights to freedom of speech and assembly and the broader concern of the possible chilling effect of a SLAPP suit, not any illegality of action, the proper indicator of whether a corporate is acting in bad faith or attempting to defeat the ends of justice;
- recognize that a civil court is not the appropriate form for determining the legality of the conduct of anyone subject to a SLAPP suit;
- provide a suitable barrier to defamation and other common torts used by corporations to dissuade public participation; and
- provide legal aid to victims of SLAPP lawsuits, essential to secure procedural fairness and equality of arms in proceedings.
Read more:
Greenpeace Submission to the Advisory Panel on Anti-SLAPP Legislation
Greenpeace pamphlet: Ethical Companies don’t SLAPP people around