We welcome
Judit Bayer, PhD habil., Senior Research Fellow at the University of Münster and Associate Professor at the Budapest Business School, to this Leibniz Media Lunch Talk. Bayer will talk about the SLAPP phenomenon: SLAPP stands for Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation. In many political and economic sectors, individuals or institutions try to prevent journalistic reporting on them with reference to allegedly unjustifiably compromised trade secrets or personal rights. These strategic lawsuits against public participation are increasingly perceived as a threat to public discourse and the problem is now being addressed at the European level. In her talk, Judit Bayer addresses the associated challenges of definition and regulation.
Dr. Tobias Mast will provide the introduction. The event will be held in English.
When?
12 p.m. to 1 p.m.
Registration
If you would like to attend, please register using this form. You will receive the registration data for Zoom shortly before the event.
About the Talk
The European Union has addressed the problem of strategic litigation against public participation (SLAPP) in the frames of the Democracy Action Plan 2020. A proposal for a directive has been published in April 2022 by the Commission. The proposal aims to protect journalists and human rights defenders against abusive litigation that has a chilling effect on their public participation, by proposing various procedural instruments for civil and commercial procedures. The talk will discuss the problem of SLAPP, the challenges of definition and regulation, and immerse into the regulatory proposals of the directive.
About Our Guest
Judit Bayer is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Münster, Institute for Information, Telecommunication and Media Law (ITM), and associate professor of media law and international law at the Budapest Business School, Hungary. Her research field is the intersection of digital technology and human rights. Recent research fields are AI and Ethics, platform regulation, and media freedom and pluralism. She has a PhD in constitutional law (internet regulation) and habilitation in constitutional law (data protection). Judit Bayer has authored several books, policy papers and articles in the field of media freedom and platform regulation. Most recently she specialised in disinformation, hate speech, SLAPP, and the human rights requirements of AI systems.
