The International Press Institute (IPI) today welcomes the ruling by the Zurich Commercial Court which overwhelmingly dismissed a lawsuit brought by U.S. data analytics company Palantir Technologies and its Swiss subsidiary against the independent Zurich-based magazine Republik.
The decision marks an important victory for investigative journalism in Switzerland and establishes limits on the use of right-of-reply rules as a weapon against public interest reporting.
In a ruling on June 12, Zurich’s commercial court dismissed the majority of counterstatement requests filed by the tech company and its Swiss subsidiary, finding that in only a single passage of the article the conditions for the right of reply were met. While the company did not seek damages, it sued to try and force the magazine to publish its detailed rebuttals.
Palantir lost on 22 of the 23 counts in the lawsuit, leaving the vast majority of the original reporting intact. The court ruled that the rebuttal demands had targeted non-factual elements of the reporting and were therefore not applicable within the Swiss right-of-reply framework.
The court ordered Palantir to bear 95% of the 9,000 Swiss francs (EUR 9,800) in court costs and to pay Republik 9,900 Swiss francs (EUR 10,700) in legal expenses. The decision is not yet final and can be appealed to the Swiss Federal Supreme Court.
Palantir’s claims stemmed from a joint investigative series published in December 2025 in which Republik detailed the company’s seven-year effort to market its surveillance software to Swiss authorities. The reports, which received wide international coverage, showed that Palantir was repeatedly rejected by multiple government bodies and highlighted an internal Swiss Army assessment warning against adopting its systems because of reputational risks and the potential exposure of sensitive military data to U.S. authorities.
IPI has previously stressed that Palantir’s legal actions appeared aimed at undermining independent reporting and creating a chilling effect on public interest journalism, and expressed full solidarity with the Republik team and its reporting.
While welcoming the decision of the Zurich Commercial Court, IPI reiterates its call for Switzerland to establish stronger legal safeguards and procedures to protect journalists and civil society actors from other forms of abusive litigation.
In response to the verdict, Republik’s co-editor-in-chief Daniel Binswanger concluded: “This ruling shows that independent journalism can stand its ground against powerful corporations.”