Warsaw: The deadline that European Union member states have been talking around for two years now arrives in fewer than three weeks, and the political conversation inside the Polish capital has shifted accordingly. The Anti-SLAPP Directive, formally Directive 2024/1069 on protecting persons engaged in public participation from manifestly unfounded or abusive court proceedings, must be transposed into national law by 7 May 2026. Warsaw’s draft amendments to the Code of Civil Procedure were sent for inter-ministerial consultation in early April and are now circulating with the Ministry of Justice’s legal services. The text is one of the more ambitious in the Union because it extends the early dismissal mechanism beyond the cross-border floor that the directive mandates.
The cross-border floor is what makes this directive unusual. The text only obliges member states to apply the new procedural safeguards to proceedings with cross-border implications, defined as cases where the parties are domiciled in different jurisdictions or where the act of public participation concerned a matter of public interest relevant to more than one member state. Domestic SLAPPs, the type that Polish media organisations and Slovak investigative reporters have flagged as the more common pressure tool, fall outside the directive’s binding scope. The recommendation that accompanied the directive urges member states to extend equivalent protections to purely domestic cases, and Warsaw has accepted that invitation in the draft now in circulation.
Three pillars define the directive. Courts must be able to dismiss SLAPPs at an early stage when the claim is manifestly unfounded. Defendants must be able to recover the legal costs they incur. And courts must be able to impose effective, proportionate and dissuasive penalties on claimants who pursue abusive litigation. The Polish drafters have proposed a shifted burden of proof for the early dismissal phase, so that once a defendant has shown they were engaged in public participation, the claimant must establish that the claim has merit on a balance of probabilities. That goes further than the directive language and has triggered pushback from the Polish Bar Council, which argues the threshold could chill legitimate defamation suits.
The Commission has been quietly raising concern about the slow pace of transposition across the bloc. Internal monitoring suggests that fewer than ten member states will have full transposition measures in force on the deadline, with several capitals indicating they intend to use a limited initial law to meet the deadline and follow up with more substantive measures later in the year. That two-step approach risks early infringement letters from DG JUST, which has been signalling for months that the file is a priority dossier for the new mandate.
The wider political backdrop is the Coalition for Media Freedom letter sent to Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week, asking for clarification on whether the directive’s recommendation will be reinforced through soft-law guidance later this year. Press freedom organisations have argued that without an explicit Commission communication setting out best practice for domestic SLAPP protections, the directive risks becoming a two-tier instrument that favours cross-border journalists over local reporters. Warsaw’s decision to extend the protections domestically could become the template that Brussels eventually endorses.
The political signal from Warsaw is that media freedom legislation is moving from the abstract rule-of-law conversation into concrete procedural mechanics. That is a meaningful pivot for a member state that spent much of the past decade as the case study for media pressure inside the Union.
