The law that slipped through
How we got Romania’s first anti-SLAPP law by keeping our mouths shut, as some politicians advised us to do during the “legislative process”
The anti-SLAPP law (Law 193/2026) has been signed by the President. After several years of negotiations and persistence, Romania now has a law that protects critical voices from intimidation lawsuits, known in English as SLAPPs (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation). These are lawsuits in which an authority or a corporation uses its financial power against people who dare to stand up for their rights. We should be glad to have this law, but because nothing in Romania is ever done all the way, we want to tell you why it could have been different, and why in the end “this was all that was possible.”
A good but incomplete Directive
Our law is not original, because SLAPPs are not a Romanian invention. It transposes a European Directive born of the need to protect powerless citizens from the powerful and wealthy. The Directive came after Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed in 2017 by a bomb placed under her car. She had more than 40 SLAPP cases open against her, because she had dared to write about the dirty business of the rich and powerful.
The Directive has one limit: Brussels cannot interfere in member states’ civil procedure except in cross-border cases. So the Directive only covers cross-border lawsuits. According to the Coalition Against SLAPPs in Europe (CASE), these account for only 8.5% of the more than 1,300 SLAPP cases documented in Europe between 2010 and 2024. The rest are purely domestic. In every country, most of them pit local or national authorities or corporations against citizens or journalists who speak out against deals that harm their communities.
For example, when this law was first drafted, two Romanian NGOs had already been dissolved because they could not pay the legal costs of such a lawsuit brought by a real-estate developer. And several citizens who protested and held the state accountable for breaking environmental rules are now burdened with legal costs for daring to defend their right to clean air.
A better law is not made in Parliament
Since 2024, together with other organisations, journalists and people who had been targeted, we have campaigned for a broader transposition of the Directive. We wanted a law better than the Directive: one that would also apply to domestic cases, offer safeguards in criminal and administrative proceedings, and do something concrete about disproportionate legal costs.
We conducted dozens of interviews with people who had been “SLAPPed.” We heard outrageous stories and learned how these lawsuits work, and how an ordinary person has almost no chance of beating a well-oiled machine backed by a lot of money, sometimes even public money, which means money we pay ourselves.
After documenting the phenomenon, we made a series of concrete proposals to the Ministry of Justice, which was drafting the bill. At first we were told, of course, that it couldn’t be done: if that’s what the Directive says, that’s exactly how we must transpose it, with no improvements. The EU wouldn’t allow it.
So we wrote to the EU and asked: will you let us make a better law, one that applies to all domestic cases, not just cross-border ones? Of course the EU said yes, and even encouraged us to go further. With the answer from Brussels in hand, and the stories of the people we had interviewed, we went back to the Ministry. And it must be said that we found people there willing to listen. What convinced them that the problem exists within our borders too was the concrete cases we presented, not just the argument that “the EU allows it.”
In the end, the Ministry of Justice included domestic cases in the bill sent to Parliament, but nothing more. It seemed a good start, and we settled for it at that stage. We thought that, as with every law we have helped shape over the years, we would achieve more in Parliament. After all, if a good law for the people can’t be debated and made where the people’s elected representatives sit, then where?
Keep your mouths shut if you want the law to pass
The bill was first submitted to the Chamber of Deputies. Before the debates, we tried to hold some preliminary talks with a representative of one of the parliamentary committees that would give an opinion on it. Three civil society representatives attended that meeting, at which the Liberal MP told us frankly that, although he personally would support the improvements we were asking for, the law was not a priority for his fellow MPs. If we wanted it adopted, we had better “keep our mouths shut” in public and stop being so critical of those in power. Otherwise, he told us, the law would never pass, let alone with the improvements we still wanted.
This was obviously arrogance, even if not his personally. Romania could not afford not to transpose the European Directive, so Parliament had to vote some law. But under the circumstances, the little we had gained at the Ministry could have been wiped out by vindictive MPs. Almost two years of work could have gone down the drain.
We decided to keep our mouths shut, as the MP had urged us, because there was an interest at stake greater than our own. We could have made the conversation public, but would that have helped the SLAPP cases pending in Romanian courts? We will never know what would have happened if… And indeed, it is not a decision we are proud of, but we chose an imperfect law over a worse one.
Still, in March 2026 we submitted a set of amendments to the Chamber of Deputies, backed by 60 other organisations, so that at least they would be discussed during the parliamentary debates. The amendments were also sent personally to every member of the Legal Affairs Committee. Some of them were supported by the USR group in the committee, but even those did not pass.
At the only debate held in the Legal Affairs Committee, we were treated with condescension and irony, as intruders in a discussion that was none of our business, not as civil society partners with every right to be at that table. In the end, the MPs asked for the committee discussion to be postponed because… they had not received the civil society amendments. They had received them, and more than once, but there had to be a pretence of debate, so that no one could say there had been none.
In the end, the Chamber of Deputies adopted the bill tacitly, in the form proposed by the Ministry, without a vote and without a single plenary session in which anyone explained why they didn’t want a better law. Keeping our mouths shut worked: the MPs did not oppose the transposition of the Directive, and the law slipped through quietly once the 45-day deadline from its submission had passed, without being debated. It then passed the Senate and in September 2026 reached the President’s desk. And there we were, fingers crossed, even pleading with the President to sign it, imperfect as it is, rather than send it back to Parliament, because who knows what would come out the second time.
What the new law gets right
The law applies to domestic cases, not just cross-border ones, which is what we needed most. A defendant can ask for early dismissal of a manifestly unfounded claim, and the claimant must then prove that the claim is well founded. This is a real gain, because a person no longer has to be dragged for years through a costly lawsuit that they neither deserve nor can afford.
Defendants can also claim damages without paying court fees, and there is a judicial fine of between 10,000 and 100,000 lei for abusive proceedings, that is, when the judge finds that the lawsuit was filed only to intimidate. Civic organisations can intervene in lawsuits in support of citizens who are being sued, and the Ombudsman also gains a role in such cases.
But every time we read the law, we also look at what is missing. Criminal and administrative proceedings are left out, even though these are precisely the routes that authorities and powerful companies use to intimidate people and civic organisations.
There is also no real mechanism against disproportionate legal costs claimed by plaintiffs. The law simply refers to the Code of Civil Procedure, the same code under which the organisations that lost their cases were dissolved because they could not pay the legal costs and damages.
State legal aid for citizens without legal representation remains largely symbolic (500–1,000 lei per stage of proceedings), compared with lawyers hired for tens of thousands of euros by the state or by large corporations.
Moreover, people already dragged into such a lawsuit will get no help from the new law, because it only applies to future cases.
What comes next?
The conclusion we draw, without joy, is that politicians did not want this law. They accepted it because they had to, under European obligations, and what came out of it is largely to the credit of those of us who persisted, not of those who voted in Parliament. Of course, they could have made it even worse. The reason we choose not to name the party representative who told us to keep our mouths shut is that he is not the only one who thinks this way about NGOs and civil society in general. He was simply more honest than the others.
Still, making a law that protects rights and freedoms should rise above personal pride and quarrels, because it will also serve the citizens who elected those politicians who are angry with part of civil society. It will serve all of us. And passing a law requires debate, negotiation and dialogue with everyone involved, not “keep your mouths shut, we’re in power!”
Finally, the law exists, and we will see whether what we won today on our knees can be used from now on standing up. As for what was left out of it… we are not stopping here.
P.S. We decided to tell this story so that there is a written record of how democracy worked in Romania in 2026. You can also find here the history of this project, in which we tried to make a better anti-SLAPP law.