When Antonio Tricarico was summoned to his local police station in October and told he was being investigated for defamation, he was stressed but not shocked. Months earlier, Tricarico, the director of the Italian environment NGO ReCommon, had filed a joint legal challenge against the country’s biggest oil company, Eni, which he knew had a history of using lawyers to clamp down on critics.
The company had previously limited itself to civil defamation lawsuits, including against ReCommon, but in Tricarico’s case it initiated criminal proceedings over statements he had made in a television interview.
