Thank you so much for your question. It's exactly right.
This is a real trend we're now seeing. I represent many publishers and journalists around the world who are targeted in a deliberate attempt to silence them and to stop them speaking truth to power. Increasingly what I'm seeing is the use of laws that are not just traditional legal weapons used against journalists, like, for example, defamation laws, but a much wider range of laws are being deployed.
Quite often, what we see are deliberate attempts to smear the journalist or the publisher, like Jimmy Lai, for example, being accused of being a fraudster, in essence; José Rubén Zamora, the publisher of elPeriódico in Guatemala similarly being accused of money laundering; and Maria Ressa, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, being accused of being a tax evader.
These are all tactics we now see, and that's quite deliberate, because what it's designed to do is undermine the messenger and make the audience lose trust in the publisher, the journalist or their newspaper or broadcast organization. As a result, it undermines the message, so that's a real tactic we're seeing.
I'm speaking to you just a couple of days after I spent some time with one of my other clients, Paul Caruana Galizia, whose mother, of course, was assassinated eight years ago in Malta for being a journalist. That was in October 2017. At the time of her death, she was facing 48 different lawsuits—a legal whack-a-mole where she was facing multiple different cases. The Caruana Galizias are very clear that there is a direct link between what their mother experienced and the kinds of tactics we're seeing in Hong Kong against Jimmy Lai, including the barrage of spurious lawsuits and having to fight a war on multiple legal fronts. The most serious one of all, of course, is the NSL and sedition trial he faces now because of the very grave sentence that would potentially come from it and that we think is likely to come from it, which, in reality, would condemn this man to death.