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.

On April 25, 2024, at the turn of the decade for CGFoE, we will celebrate our many milestones and partnerships at the all-day event “Safeguarding Free Expression: The Role of Judicial Systems in Pivotal Times.” For the high-level conference co-chaired by UNESCO, global free speech advocates will convene, with Catalina Botero, UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Expression at Universidad de los Andes, and Aryeh Neier, President Emeritus of the Open Society Foundations, speaking at the opening session. The first panel, “Breakthrough Verdicts: Legal Decisions Shaping the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals,” will discuss landmark rulings and regional perspectives from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, Europe, and the United States. The second panel, “Critical Legal Frontiers: Global Challenges to Freedom of Expression,” will focus on SLAPPs, Environment/Journalism, Elections, and AI. Between the two discussions, we will break for a networking lunch in thematic conversation groups with experts and anyone interested in advancing global freedom of expression.

It is a great honor for us to introduce the event’s keynote speaker and master of ceremonies – Elena Kostyuchenko, Russian journalist, activist, and recipient of the European Press Prize, the Gerd Bucerius Award, and the Paul Klebnikov Prize. Elena is one of Russia’s bravest and most talented reporters, who spent seventeen years writing for Novaya Gazeta, the country’s last major independent newspaper that was shut down in 2022. Elena has survived two attacks from the Russian government. Despite that, she continues reporting. Her most recently published book, I Love Russia, interrogates the country’s descent into fascism and war.

As the announcement of the 2024 CGFoE Prize winners approaches, we bring more nominees for you to explore. The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights held that Benin’s Criminal Code violated the right to freedom of expression because it restricted without a legitimate aim the possibility of commenting on and critiquing judicial decisions only to specialized journals. The First Chamber of the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice considered media audiences as subjects of collective rights worthy of protection, ruling that the 2017 decree that reformed the Federal Telecommunications and Broadcasting Law restricted the petitioner NGO’s right to defend the rights of the audiences, freedom of expression, and access to information. Although failing to include an assessment of freedom of expression, the Turkish Constitutional Court recognized that the process of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s departure from his country and his premeditated murder was due to his journalistic activities and dissenting opinions.

Elena Kostyuchenko, Russian journalist and activist, will be CGFoE’s keynote speaker on April 25, 2024.

Decisions this Week

Türkiye
The application on whether there had been an effective investigation into Jamal Khashoggi’s death in Turkey
Decision Date: May 10, 2023
The Turkish Constitutional Court held that the right to life had not been violated by Turkey’s inability to effectively investigate and prosecute those responsible for Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s murder. Khashoggi had left the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia due to his views opposing its government and he was killed at the Saudi Arabian Consulate General in Istanbul. The Saudi Arabian Public Prosecutor’s Office, in a press statement, indicated that a decision had been made to kill Khashoggi if he could not be persuaded to return to Saudi Arabia during a meeting at the Consulate, where a brawl occurred, resulting in Khashoggi’s death. The Turkish authorities had attempted to extradite those responsible to stand trial in Turkey, but the Saudi officials refused to comply. The Court held that these failures were not due to fault on the part of Turkish officials, and so the right to life had not been violated. The Court declined to hear arguments on the infringement of the right to freedom of expression on the grounds that they had not been aired fully in the lower courts. It did, however, confirm that Khashoggi had been killed because of his public criticism of Saudi Arabia’s government.

The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights
Noudehouenou v. Benin
Decision Date: December 1, 2022
The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights held that Benin’s Criminal Code violated the right to freedom of expression, as enshrined in Article 9(2) of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (the Charter), because it restricted the possibility of commenting and critiquing judicial decisions only to specialized journals without a legitimate aim. Mr. Houngue Éric Noudehouenou, the applicant, claimed that this limitation to the right to criticize courts’ decisions —approved by the Government and the Constitutional Court of Benin— violated Article 9 of the Charter. The Respondent State did not submit any allegations. The Court ruled that the restrictions provided for in the Criminal Code were vague and that there was “no compelling need to restrict citizens to certain means of communication thereby depriving them of having recourse to others which are available to them to make technical comments on court decisions and thus to exercise their right to freedom of expression.” [para. 112] The Court ordered Benin to bring the Criminal Code in line with Article 9 of the Charter and awarded the plaintiff reparation for moral damages.

Mexico
Strategic Litigation Center for the Defense of Human Rights v. Chamber of Deputies and Senators
Decision Date: January 19, 2022
The First Chamber of the Mexican Supreme Court of Justice held that the 2017 decree that reformed the Federal Telecommunications and Broadcasting Law violated the Constitution of Mexico by restricting the petitioner NGO’s right to defend the rights of the audiences, freedom of expression, and access to information. The Strategic Litigation Center for the Defense of Human Rights (Centro de Litigio Estratégico para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos) filed an amparo to declare the nullity of the 2017 decree for illegally restricting procedural remedies for the defense of the rights of the audiences. The Court recognized media users and audiences as a collective subject deserving of legal protection and thus held that the 2017 decree—by empowering telecommunications concessionaires to issue rules for self-regulation and repealing the guidelines stipulated by Mexico’s Federal Telecommunications Institute—violated the principle of non-retrogression of human rights and the rights of media audiences. The Court explained that by delegating to the concessionaires the power to regulate themselves, pluralistic and quality public deliberation, freedom of expression, and access to information were put at risk since such agents have their own economic and commercial interests that could discourage open public debate.

Community Highlights & Recent News

● Upcoming Event –  Report Launch: Nations in Transit 2024. Join Freedom House online to learn firsthand of the new report on the 29 countries spanning Central Europe and Central Asia. The report scrutinizes the state of democracy in “a region increasingly defined by the widening gulf between those nations committed to a liberal, democratic order and those that violently reject it.” Some of the speakers will be Nicole Bibbins Sedaca, Executive Vice President at Freedom House, David J. Kramer, Executive Director of George W. Bush Institute and Vice President of George W. Bush Presidential Center, and Mike Smeltzer, Report Co-Author and Senior Research Analyst for Europe and Eurasia. The panelists will discuss the report’s main findings. April 11, 2024. 10-11:30 am ET. Register here.

● India: New Report on Election Disinformation Ads and YouTube. Access Now and Global Witness carried out a joint investigation that resulted in a new report titled, “Votes will not be counted”: Indian election disinformation ads and YouTube.” The investigation tested how YouTube handled election disinformation in India; its testing method was the submission of 48 ads in English, Hindi, and Telugu that violated YouTube policies on advertising and election misinformation: “The ad content included voter suppression through false information on changes to the voting age, instructions to vote by text message, and incitement to prevent certain groups from voting.” YouTube approved every submitted ad for publication. Access Now and Global Witness withdrew the ads before they could be published. With India’s general election approaching, the report stresses the urgency of the findings and calls on YouTube to deliver its promises and play its part in ensuring free and fair elections. Download the full report here.

● Meta’s Oversight Board Policy Advisory Opinion: Censorship of ‘Shaheed’ Is “Unnecessary and Disproportionate.” On March 26, 2024, Meta’s Oversight Board (OSB) published a policy advisory opinion on the company’s moderation of the word “shaheed.” The OSB ruled that Meta’s moderation of “shaheed” is too broad, disproportionately restrictive, and failing to consider the word’s multiple meanings. The OSB recommended that the company end its “blanket ban” of the term and change its policy, prioritizing “a more contextually informed analysis of content.” SMEX, a non-profit advancing digital rights across West Asia and North Africa, welcomed the decision, which integrated public comments of experts and stakeholders, including SMEX. Commenting on the OSB’s opinion, the Center for Democracy & Technology reiterated its call on companies like Meta to “invest in digitizing low resource languages, to create evaluation benchmarks for languages other than English, and to work with NLP communities that are experts in language and cultural contexts to do so.”

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.

2024 the Year of Democracy: African Electoral Authorities Release Guidelines for Social Media Use. The Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) published guidelines tailored for the use of digital platforms at the time of elections. They aim to both mobilize the platforms’ positive potential and combat the spread of disinformation, hate speech, and online gender-based violence, among other possible harms. The Guidelines were adopted by the General Assembly of the Association of African Election Authorities in Cotonou, Benin, on 3 November 2023 and represent a “crucial normative framework” for the continent. Emphasizing obligations to preserve the rights to equality and non-discrimination, free and fair elections, freedom of expression, access to information, freedom of assembly, rights to privacy and remedy, protection of women’s rights, as well as ethnic, cultural, and linguistic rights, the Guidelines directly address states, election management bodies, social media, regulatory bodies, political parties, “African traditional institutions and religious bodies,” civil society, and journalists. The Guidelines are in Arabic, English, French, and Portuguese.

Post Scriptum

● A Love Triangle? Mapping Interactions between International Human Rights Institutions, Meta and Its Oversight Board, by Anna Sophia Tiedeke and Martin Fertmann. In this article, published in the European Journal of International Law, the authors set out to break from the continuous debate on what Meta’s Oversight Board (OSB) is, moving “away from trying to fit [the OSB] within established institutional categories.” Instead, they focus on what the Board does, interrogating its in-betweenness. Their research analyzes interactions between Meta, the OSB, and international human rights institutions, highlights “who is included and excluded and who refuses to participate or to respond,” and thus intends “to paint a more detailed picture of the various roles that novel actors, such as Meta and the [OSB], are beginning to assume in the protection of international human rights online.”

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