Columbia Global Freedom of Expression seeks to contribute to the development of an integrated and progressive jurisprudence and understanding on freedom of expression and information around the world.  It maintains an extensive database of international case law. This is its newsletter dealing with recent developments  in the field.

Community Highlights & Recent News

●  Upcoming Event – CFOM Online Seminar Series – Andrei Richter. The Centre for Freedom of the Media (CFOM) is hosting the final session of its seminar series on global media freedom. Andrei Richter, a Research Professor at Comenius University in Bratislava and former Director and Senior Adviser at the Office of the OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media, will be closing the seminar series as a speaker. The event’s focus will be on lies and truths in political and legal contexts on national and international levels. In light of disinformation laws and false news’ ubiquity across the world, Richter will explore the following questions, “1) Is there a human right to [know] the truth? (2) Is there a human right to [disseminate] lies?” December 12, 2023. 4:00 pm GMT (London) / 11:00 am ET (New York). Register here to attend.

● Upcoming Event – 19th International e-Society.mk Conference: Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights. The 19th e-Society.mk Conference, organized by Metamorphosis Foundation based in North Macedonia, will focus on “Artificial intelligence and Human rights: Finding the right balance between innovation and responsibility.” The conference speakers will address AI ethics, privacy, discrimination, marginalization, and disinformation, unpacking the challenge of human rights protection “without stifling technological progress.” The conference languages will be English, Macedonian, and Albanian. December 19, 2023. 9:30 am – 2:00 pm CET. The attendance format is hybrid. For those joining in person, the event will take place at Ballroom I of Hotel Marriott in Skopje, North Macedonia. For those joining online, you could do so through ZOOM or Facebook Live. Register here by December 14.

● New Report – The Free Speech Recession Hits Home: Mapping Laws and Regulations Affecting Free Speech in 22 Open Democracies. The Future of Free Speech has released a new report that analyzes free speech protections and restrictions implemented in twenty-two open democracies from 2015 until 2022. The study found that 78% of the developments surveyed by country experts represented intensified restrictions on freedom of expression; 57% of those were legislative actions, while “national security, national cohesion, and public safety” most often served as cited reasons. In his Foreign Policy article that discusses the report’s findings, Jacob Mchangama, CEO of The Future of Free Speech, notes, “The scale of speech restrictions in the shrinking club of open democracies suggests that while democracies face serious challenges, the prescribed cure to these ills risks becoming worse than the disease.” Download the full report here.

● Hungary: Draft Sovereignty Protection Act Poses Fresh Threat to Independent Media. In their collective statement, coordinated by the Media Freedom Rapid Response, several press freedom organizations – including the International Press Institute, ARTICLE 19 Europe, and the European Centre for Press and Media Freedom – warn the EU of more threats to independent media in Hungary. The organizations argue the proposed Sovereignty Protection Act is “the latest prong of a decade-long campaign by the government of Prime Minister Victor Orbán to harass critics and suppress democratic checks and balances.” Even though the draft act does not mention media specifically, the bill’s vagueness and broad application scope could enable a state-sponsored crackdown on those media outlets that depend on foreign funds and criticize the government. The organizations’ statement calls on the EU to oppose the bill and, if the bill becomes law, to challenge it in court

Decisions this Week

Brazil
Jean Wyllys v. Carlos Bolsonaro and Eduardo Bolsonaro
Decision Date: February 14, 2023
A Brazilian court ordered the removal of defamatory social media content and compensation to a political leader who had been accused of stabbing a presidential candidate. Despite clear evidence that person who had stabbed the candidate had acted alone, the candidate’s sons had posted on Facebook and Twitter that the political leader had orchestrated the attack. The Court emphasized that the right to freedom of expression is not absolute and that there must be a balance between the right to research and disseminate information and the right of the community to receive information corresponding to reality. It found that as the posts caused harm to honor and were inaccurate they should be removed and the political leader compensated.

Charles Berbare v. Google Brasil Internet Ltda
Decision Date: August 14, 2017
A Brazilian court rejected a request made by a citizen who wanted Google to remove search results linked to articles about his illegal conduct. The citizen had been arrested six years before and wanted the articles removed from search results as he believed they were slanderous and discredited him. The Court rejected the application, finding that there were no grounds to justify his request and the Court emphasized that Google did not have control over the content of the articles which did, in any event, not contain any information that was illegal.

Bosnia
The Case of B.B.
Decision Date: September 7, 2022
The Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Hercegovina (CCBH) found a violation of freedom of expression in a case of an appellant (a prosecutor) subjected to disciplinary sanctions for using harsh words against a judge in a court proceeding in which the appellant was a party in his private capacity. The appellant, in his appeal on a decision regarding a court’s fee, wrote that the judge should pay the fee since the judge’s decision was unfair, illegal and incomprehensible. The High Judicial and Prosecutorial Council opined that such statements breached the rules on protection of judiciary and preservation of dignity of prosecutorial function. Hence, the appellant was sanctioned by a public warning. Yet, the CCBH found such a sanction not to be necessary in a democratic society since the appellant acted in his own capacity representing his interests. Moreover, the CCBH believed that the words used were not offensive towards the acting judge nor the judiciary

Teaching Freedom of Expression Without Frontiers

This section of the newsletter features teaching materials focused on global freedom of expression which are newly uploaded on Freedom of Expression Without Frontiers.

ECtHR Factsheet on Hate Speech, November 2023.
The ECtHR’s Press Service published an updated factsheet that includes the Court’s case law and pending cases grouped by themes on hate speech. The factsheet explains two approaches used by the Court in considering such cases: 1) “the approach of exclusion from the protection of the Convention,” based on Article 17; and 2) “the approach of setting restrictions on protection,” based on paragraph 2 of Article 10. The two approaches structure the first part of the cases’ list, which is not exhaustive; each case is marked by a narrower corresponding theme (“Threat to the democratic order,” “Racial hate,” “Incitement to violence or hatred against people because of their sexual orientation,” “Incitement to ethnic hatred,” and “Extremism” among many others). The factsheet’s second part contains two big groups of cases sorted as “Online hate speech” and “Hate speech and right of others to respect for private life.” The most recent cases highlighted in the factsheet include Lenis v. Greece and Rivadulla Duró v. Spain (both are decisions on admissibility), Ossewaarde v. Russia, Fragoso Dacosta v. Spain, Sanchez v. France, and Valaitis v. Lithuania.

Post Scriptum

● Speech that Isn’t Mine: Obligations Under the European Court of Human Rights, by Natalie Alkiviadou. The article, published in the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, reviews the ECtHR’s 2023 ruling in Sanchez v. France and asks, “[H]ow on earth did we reach a point [of] imposing a criminal penalty on an internet user for someone else’s speech and how does such a penalty align with the principles of necessity and proportionality […]?” Dr. Natalie Alkiviadou, a Senior Research Fellow at Justitia, addresses that and other questions raised by the Grand Chamber’s ruling and analyzes the Court’s jurisprudence on hate speech in the political realm. The article argues the Sanchez case represents a worrying trend and “adds to the long list of hate speech cases decided by the ECtHR without sufficient contextual or theoretical substantiation,” leading the Court to lower the threshold of free speech protection. Read the publication here.

● Why MLRC Filed an Amicus Brief at the Supreme Court. On November 30, 2023, the Media Law Resource Center (MLRC) filed an amicus curiae brief with the US Supreme Court in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton. In this recently published article, Jeff Hermes, Deputy Director of MLRC, explains the brief’s timing and why the Center chose to intervene solo. Hermes notes, “[I]t is not too strong a statement to say that the NetChoice cases could be as fundamental to the future of online discourse as Times v. Sullivan has been to journalism.” Emphasizing the right of individuals to receive information, Hermes argues Texas and Florida have attempted to quash social media platforms’ editorial discretion, thus undermining “the marketplace of ideas” to which content moderation is essential. In the amicus brief, MLRC also stresses, “[I]t is content moderation that keeps social media from becoming an unintelligible babble of misinformation and irrelevancies.”

This newsletter is reproduced with the permission of Global Freedom of Expression.  For an archive of previous newsletters, see here.