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

● In Cases Involving Florida and Texas Social Media Laws, Knight Institute Urges Supreme Court to Reject “Extreme” Arguments Made by States and Platforms. The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed an amicus curiae brief with the US Supreme Court in Moody v. NetChoice, LLC and NetChoice, LLC v. Paxton on December 7, 2023. In the two cases, the platforms argue any regulation of their content moderation violates the First Amendment, while Florida and Texas assert their “must-carry provisions” – those directly affecting social media platforms’ content moderation decisions – are constitutional. The Knight Institute argues in support of neither party and calls on the Court to dismiss both theories. The amicus brief explains that “social media platforms’ content-moderation decisions are protected by the First Amendment because they reflect the exercise of editorial judgment, but that laws that implicate editorial judgment can be constitutional in some circumstances.”

● New report exposes infrastructure behind cyberattacks on IPI and Hungarian media.Forensic analysis confirms the cyberattack that targeted the International Press Institute (IPI) in September 2023 was retaliatory and part of the growing campaign against independent media in Hungary. The DDoS attack followed IPI’s release of a report on cyber threats to Hungarian media and brought the Institute’s website to a halt for several days. The attack’s initial assessment showed links to the wave of cyberattacks that had targeted dozens of Hungarian media outlets last spring. The Qurium, a non-profit based in Sweden, analyzed the attack’s infrastructure and agreed with the initial assessment, describing it as “highly probable.” Scott Griffen, IPI Deputy Director, responded to the evidence, noting, “This campaign has now gone transnational – and even civil society organizations beyond Hungary’s borders who stand in support of these important outlets can be targeted.” Griffen stressed IPI will continue to stand by independent media in Hungary.

● Lebanon: Legislators Insist on Criminalizing Journalists in New Media Law. SMEX reports that a proposed media law threatens to constrain freedom of expression in Lebanon. Despite UNESCO’s recommendations and other comprehensive insights into the draft, parliamentary committees are considering “the outdated version of the proposed law, with minimal amendments suggested solely by its members.” The discussion of the law stays behind closed doors and in the absence of journalists and civil society representatives. SMEX argues the committees are pushing “for a punitive version of the new media law.” Elsie Mufarrej, a Journalist and Coordinator of Press Syndicate Nakaba Badila, told SMEX the proposed law aggravates continuing prosecutions of media workers as the parliamentary committees “endorse provisions facilitating the imprisonment of journalists.” 

● People-Centered Access to Justice Research: A Global Perspective. The Justice Data Observatory released a new study conducted in partnership with the Access to Justice Research Initiative at the American Bar Foundation, the International Development Research Centre, OECD – OCDE, and The World Bank. The study stems from the gaps that exist in civil justice research – an underexplored area if compared with criminal justice. The project sets to develop a civil justice research agenda “by exploring the landscape of existing research into relationships between people-centered access to justice and three outcomes: democratic empowerment, economic development, and poverty alleviation.” What research questions have been explored in the field? What questions remain unanswered? Which research contexts have the necessary data, and which contexts do not? Focusing on these questions, the study turns to three sources: 1) cross-national datasets, 2) expert interviews, and 3) a literature review.

Decisions this Week

Hong Kong
Case of “Glory to Hong Kong” Song
Decision Date: October 31, 2023
The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Court (Court of First Instance) rejected the request of the Secretary of Justice and Hong Kong authorities to prohibit the use of a song titled “願榮光歸香港” or Glory to Hong Kong, which was associated with pro-independence sentiments and widely used during protests. The Secretary of Justice filed an Interlocutory Injunction-in-Aid of Criminal Law, contending that the song constituted serious criminal offenses undermining national security. The Court, led by Justice Anthony Chan, deliberated on the exceptional jurisdiction of the Court in granting such an injunction, considering its effectiveness, potential conflicts with criminal laws, and its impact on freedom of expression. The Court expressed skepticism about the utility of the injunction, highlighted concerns about conflicts with the National Security Law, and ultimately concluded that, with qualifications, the injunction was not necessary and tipped the balance unfavorably against individual rights of freedom of expression, leading to the dismissal of the application.

European Court of Human Rights
BILD GMBH v. Germany
Decision Date: October 23, 2023
The Fourth Section of the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the injunction requiring a news company to cease the publication of unedited CCTV footage depicting a police officer without pixelating his face violated the freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case involved the publication of footage showing a police intervention in a nightclub, where the officer’s identity was revealed. While the ECtHR acknowledged the legitimate interest of civil servants, including police officers, in protecting their private lives, it found deficiencies in the domestic courts’ balancing of conflicting rights. The Court highlighted the importance of considering the specific context and potential contribution to public debate in each case, emphasizing that the broad restriction on future publications lacked justification and did not meet the necessity criteria in a democratic society.

Brazil
Gazeta do Povo v. Baptista et. al.
Decision Date: October 2, 2023
The Supreme Federal Court of Brazil acted to prevent Strategic Lawsuits against Public Participation (SLAPPs) and held that the freedom of the press encompasses the right to criticize public authorities. In response to critical reports by a Brazilian newspaper on the salaries of judges and prosecutors in Paraná, judges initiated multiple identical compensation lawsuits against the newspaper and five journalists in various lower courts. The Supreme Court ruled that these actions constituted an abuse of rights, emphasizing the need to protect journalistic freedom and prevent legal tactics that could impede public discourse. In recognizing the SLAPP aspects of the case, the Court observed, “[t]he present case exposes an illegitimate stratagem by which political agents, taking advantage of the legitimate right of access to justice through legal action, distorted the judicial process, using it as an illegitimate instrument of intimidation directed at journalists and a media outlet that disseminated information of undeniable public interest”.

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.

Conceptualizing Journalists’ Safety around the Globe
The article, by Vera Slavtcheva-Petkova, Jyotika Ramaprasad, Nina Springer, Sallie Hughes, Thomas Hanitzsch, Basyouni Hamada, Abit Hoxha, and Nina Steindl, published in Digital Journalism, responds to the variety of threats that journalists are subjected to – surveillance, cyberattacks, gendered targeting, hate speech, and many others. The article offers an interdisciplinary framework of journalists’ safety, summarizing it in a conceptual model. The authors look at journalists’ safety through two dimensions: 1) personal (physical, psychological) and 2) infrastructural (digital, financial). The authors see safety on objective and subjective levels and argue “[i]t is moderated by individual (micro), organizational/institutional (meso), and systemic (macro) risk factors, rooted in power dynamics defining boundaries for journalists’ work, which, if crossed, result in threats and create work-related stress.” The article then examines the consequences of work-related stress: While in an ideal scenario stress leads to resilience, compromised safety can provoke journalists’ “exit from the profession” and thus undermine journalism as an institution. 

Post Scriptum

● Censorship from Plato to Social Media: The Complexity of Social Media’s Content Regulation and Moderation Practices, by Gergely Gosztonyi. In this book, Dr. habil Gergely Gosztonyi, a Lawyer, Media Researcher, and Professor at the Faculty of Law, Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) Budapest, calls for a broader understanding of censorship on the way to freedom of expression protection. After a brief review of censorship history in the US and Europe, Gosztonyi delves into the challenges that technological evolution and the Internet brought, particularly through developments in the 2010s and onwards. The book analyzes different regulatory models – those of the US, EU, China, and Russia – and their similarities. One of the chapters focuses on the case law of the ECtHR and the CJEU. Finally, Gosztonyi shows that social media communication “has come – almost by default – under legal regulation and the original freedom may have been lost in too many countries in recent years.”

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