Emily O’Sullivan, on 28 October 2024, published an elaborate piece for the Global Investigative Journalism Network

Threats against investigative journalists are widely documented. According to UNESCO’s Observatory of Killed Journalists, 1,718 journalists have been killed since 1993. The Committee to Protect Journalists’ latest prison census found the number of jailed journalists hit a near-record high, with 320 reporters behind bars at the time of the count last December. Yet a lesser-known story is the increasing targeting of the lawyers representing them.

“Behind all those cases against journalists who have become household names — like Evan Gershkovich, Maria Ressa, and José Rubén Zamora — there are the often unseen lawyers representing them and taking remarkable risks to defend them,” Carolina Henriquez-Schmitz, director of TrustLaw, said at Trust Conference 2024. “[Lawyers] themselves are becoming the targets of a whole range of attacks.”

In recent years, threats have escalated. Azerbaijani lawyer Elchin Sadigov, and his client, journalist Avaz Zeynalli, were detained in 2022 while officers searched their homes and offices and seized confidential case files. Vo An Don, a Vietnamese human rights lawyer who represented a dissident blogger was disbarred in 2018 and subsequently sought political asylum in the US. Dmitry Talantov, a lawyer who represented Russian investigative journalist Ivan Safronov in 2021, now himself faces up to 15 years in prison on a number of charges.

“It sends an unequivocal message, not just to the individual lawyer, but to the entire legal profession,” Henriquez-Schmitz said. “If you pursue these cases, we will go after you. The potential chilling effect cannot be understated.”

Human rights lawyer Vo An Don was disbarred and forced to seek political asylum in the US after the Vietnamese government targeted him for representing a dissident blogger. Image: Screenshot, Facebook

The Thomson Reuters Foundation, in partnership with the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights and Media Defence, conducted a first-of-its-kind review of individual cases of harassment or persecution of lawyers defending journalists. The recently published preliminary findings identified over 40 cases of lawyers being targeted in four ways: criminal and other suits; interference with their ability to represent their clients; targeting their ability to practice the profession; and threatened killing, physical harm, forced flight, or exile, and other similar persecution.

“The research has identified cases in Vietnam, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Azerbaijan, Iran, Yemen, Tajikistan, Russia, China, and Hong Kong, to name a few. Unsurprisingly, many of these countries also happen to be among the world’s worst jailers of journalists,” Henriquez-Schmitz noted. “The damage greatly reverberates. Without lawyers, journalists are unable to adequately defend themselves against retaliatory charges, and citizens are likely left less informed on matters of public interest.”

José Carlos Zamora, chief communications and impact officer at Exile Content Studio and the son of Guatemalan investigative journalist José Rubén Zamora, joined the Trust Conference panel only a few days after his father’s release to house arrest. Previously, his father had spent more than 800 days in prison on charges of alleged money laundering. The elder Zamora founded elPeriódico, a now-defunct newspaper which specialized in government corruption investigations.

“It’s a great step forward, but it’s not the end of the process,” Zamora said of his father’s transition to house arrest. “These repressive regimes, everywhere from Russia, to the Philippines, to Hong Kong, to Venezuela and Nicaragua, use the same tactics. And you see them copy from each other’s punishments, and one of these tactics is attacking the legal defense. So they go after the lawyers, and the main goal is to leave the journalists defenseless.”

Guatemalan journalist José Rubén Zamora, who founded the elPeriódico site that dug into the country’s political corruption, recently spent more than 800 days in prison on alleged money laundering charges. Image: Shutterstock

In all, 10 lawyers represented Zamora, and all of them were persecuted and eventually forced to abandon the case. Many of them did not appear to have access to the case file, and one lawyer, Christian Ulate, had to leave Guatemala after ongoing harassment and intimidation. The lawyers that took over the case after Ulate, Romeo Montoya García and Mario Castañeda, were detained, and Castañeda was sent to a maximum security prison. Lawyers Juan Francisco Solórzano Foppa and Justino Brito Torres were also arrested.

“At that point, the only defense was the public legal defense. There were some great lawyers in the public legal defense, but unfortunately, they are also part of the system,” Zamora explained. “At one point, none of the lawyers could visit him in prison. So everything was done through us. They could rarely talk. The ones that could go did not want to visit him because it was dangerous for them.”In some countries, human rights attorney Caoilfhionn Gallagher said, even the act of talking to an international lawyer can put local lawyers at risk.

María Consuelo Porras has acted as Guatemala’s attorney general since 2018. In 2022, she was barred from entering the US due to involvement in significant corruption, and in 2023 she was named OCCRP’s Person of the Year in Organized Crime and Corruption, for “brutally persecuting honest prosecutors, journalists, and activists,” the group wrote. “Porras and her kind are the new banal faces of evil.”

“[Porras] became the best tool to persecute opposition, critical voices,” Zamora said. “Because they use this special prosecutor’s office that is focused on organized crime […] it allows them to have you in pre-trial detention. That prosecutor’s office was intended to investigate and prosecute the heads of drug cartels and mob bosses. And now they use it to go after journalists.”

Irish-born attorney Caoilfhionn Gallagher specializes in international human rights and civil liberties at Doughty Street Chambers in London. Her cases often involve working closely with domestic lawyers around the world, in order to hold the state to account on the global stage. In some countries, Gallagher said, even the act of talking to an international lawyer can put local lawyers at risk.

“When I deal with cases involving Iran, for example, or Egypt, even engaging with an international lawyer, being privy to a complaint going to the United Nations, could result in [local lawyers] themselves being charged with a whole range of things, including national security-type offenses,” she noted. One particular example she gives of lawyer oppression is the Philippines, where, in total, 63 lawyers were killed during President Rodrigo Duterte’s six-year term, and 22 journalists. “So this is completely a tactic,” Gallagher warned. “You try to leave nobody able to speak truth to power.”

One of Gallagher’s clients is 76-year-old publisher, writer, and prominent pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai. A British national, Lai has been in solitary confinement in a maximum security Hong Kong prison for almost four years, on charges of breaching national security and colluding with foreign forces. His newspaper, Apple Daily — the most popular Chinese language paper in Hong Kong — supported pro-democracy protests in the region. He now faces life imprisonment.

“Being called an enemy of the people, hit pieces in Chinese state media, formal statements from the Chinese and Hong Kong authorities threatening to prosecute us,” Gallagher said, reflecting on the implications of representing Lai. “But as well as that, we get physical threats, rape threats, and dismemberment threats, and it’s targeted in a way which is designed to try to undermine you doing your job.”“We coordinate pro bono for human rights defenders, and what we realized was that standing next to every defender facing criminalization was a lawyer also at risk.” — Ginna Anderson, associate director of the American Bar Association’s Center for Human Rights

On a key day in Lai’s case, Gallagher will wake up to notifications that there has been an attempt to hack her bank account, as well as her personal and professional email addresses. “I will also wake up to a whole series of […] threats, including things relating to my kids,” she continued. “I had a really vile message last week about my teenage daughter, by name, and it’s unpleasant.”

Gallagher says that, despite attacks, she will continue to represent reporters. “You’re rattling the right cages,” she said. “It’s designed to try to stop you doing your job, and for me, it makes me think if they care this much about the lawyers for Jimmy Lai based in London, doing work in Geneva, New York, and Dublin, just think about how much they hate my clients. And to be honest, it makes me more determined to stick with it.”

Associate director of the American Bar Association’s Center for Human Rights, Ginna Anderson, emphasized the lack of current research into the growing threats against lawyers defending journalists, citing it as a driving force behind their work. “We realized no one was really talking about it, and the data wasn’t being collected,” she explained. “We coordinate pro bono for human rights defenders, and what we realized was that standing next to every defender facing criminalization was a lawyer also at risk and asking for none of those resources for themselves.”

While networks often operate to support journalists who are being subjected to physical threats, cyberattacks, and forced exile, Anderson emphasized the ad hoc nature of the support available to lawyers — in part due to the recent escalation in cases. “There’s not one place we go and coordinate,” she said. “It’s a lot of personal relationships and knowing who has capacity, and quite frankly there’s very little capacity in any of these places to really deal with the scale of the problem.”

“Just like journalists don’t want to be part of the story, lawyers don’t, and many other trends are mirrored,” she continued. “One thing that struck me […] was this perception that safety of journalist networks are so much better connected and resourced than anything to support lawyers. That terrified me because I think we all think that there’s not enough being done for the safety of journalists.”

Attacks aren’t restricted to individual lawyers. In Belarus, for example, more than 140 lawyers have lost their licenses since 2020, according to research by Human Rights Watch, the Belarusian Association of Human Rights Lawyers, and the Right to Defence Project. They found a pattern of arbitrary and politically motivated license revocation, occurring for the first time in contemporary Belarusian history.

“Lawyers are often trusted voices, just like some legacy media establishments,” Anderson said. “They’re trusted voices on the rule of law. They’re trusted voices on the Constitution. And when you disparage them and smear them, and in some cases make it criminal for them to talk about these issues, you have silenced one of the most important voices.”

Defending Lawyers Protecting Journalists

As attacks on lawyers rise, the panel reflected on the ways in which those representing journalists can defend themselves. Increasing knowledge of cybersecurity — which may not have previously been a priority for lawyers — is essential, Gallagher said. “In the last number of years working on cases against Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia, I’ve been very surprised by [top-ranked multinational law firms] trying to send you something on Google Docs,” she continued. “The media organization and the journalists will have really good protocols, but then when they get into some kind of difficulty, they may instruct an external lawyer who simply doesn’t.”

Law societies and governments also have a responsibility to take such threats more seriously, Gallagher says, reflecting on the case of Pat Finucane, a Northern Irish human rights lawyer who was murdered in his home in 1989. The UK government only announced a public inquiry into his death in 2024, 35 years later. “That is a home example of these issues simply not being taken seriously enough,” she said. “I can tell you basic preventative strategies were simply not implemented here in Britain.”

Another issue is a lack of psychological support for lawyers, Anderson says. “I’ve been surprised how often a conversation about digital security becomes the place where a lawyer may talk about what’s weighing on their mind,” she continued. “[They’re] not saying, ‘I would like to talk about my psychosocial needs’, but they start with a practical need around digital security, and it finds its way into the things that are weighing on them.”

As Zamora reflected on the future for his father, he seemed hopeful. “He’s excited. He’s very happy. He feels like he’s at a spa after spending those 813 days in an isolation cell,” he said. “We are going to continue fighting these processes. They are really spurious charges, and we are going to fight until the end to demonstrate that everything is false.”

While he says that his father’s trial has exposed the worst in humanity, through Guatemala’s political persecution of those standing up for democracy and freedom, Zamora also believes that it has brought out the best in humanity, too. “I feel that’s everybody in this room,” he concluded. “You care about these issues, you are doing the work, and you can continue to do the work to keep these cases alive.”

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Emily O’Sullivan is an editorial assistant at GIJN. She has worked as an investigative researcher for BBC Panorama, and an assistant producer for BBC Newsnight. She has an MA in Investigative Journalism from City, University of London.

The Increasing Threats Against Lawyers Protecting Journalists