Professor Dario Milo

Overview

Professor Dario Milo is a partner at Webber Wentzel attorneys, where he leads a team focusing on media law, including defamation, privacy, access to information, freedom of expression, national security law, open justice and contempt of court. He has lectured in media law, access to information law, and privacy law at the University of the Witwatersrand for almost 20 years and is adjunct professor in media law. He also lectures in media law at Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape.

Professor Milo is an expert in freedom of expression at the Columbia University Freedom of Expression Project and was appointed to the High-Level Panel of Media Freedom Experts (chaired by Lord Neuberger) by the UK and Canadian governments in 2019. He is also an adviser to the European Commission on anti-SLAPP policy.

Milo is the author of Defamation and Freedom of Speech, published by Oxford University Press, and co-author of A Practical Guide to Media Law, published by Lexis-Nexis Butterworths (in relation to South African media law) and a number of chapters in leading texts, including most recently "Insulting speech" in Freedom of Speech in International Law edited by Amal Clooney and Lord David Neuberger and published by Oxford University Press in 2024.

Milo has acted as lead attorney for the media in numerous high profile cases before South Africa's Constitutional Court, Supreme Court of Appeal and High Courts, including the leading cases on SLAPPs, defamation, hate speech, surveillance of journalists, privacy and open justice.

These cases include a successful challenge by the media to surveillance laws (including bulk surveillance), obtaining access for the media to a sensitive report concerning the elections in Zimbabwe, successfully representing broadcasters in an application to televise and stream live the Oscar Pistorius murder trial, and developing an anti-SLAPP defence in the common law of defamation.

His current media freedom work includes acting for Penny Hammerl in freedom of information requests against the South African government relating to the whereabouts of the remains of her husband, the photojournalist Anton Hammerl (who was killed in Libya while reporting); acting for media houses in seeking to obtain tax records of former president Jacob Zuma, and acting for broadcasters in challenges to legislation requiring broadcasters to submit certain content streamed over the Internet for classification by a government regulator.