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.

Argentina’s current administration views the press as a foe. President Javier Milei has turned his phrase “We don’t hate journalists enough” into a slogan. But recent developments have caused greater alarm. Amidst a bribery scandal involving Karina Milei, Secretary General of the Presidency and Javier Milei’s sister, a federal judge ordered the media to cease the publication of recordings allegedly attributed to her.

A national and global outcry ensued. Journalist Jorge Fontevecchia, represented by a team of lawyers including Roberto Gargarella, appealed the order, arguing that it amounted to an unconstitutional prior restraint. Karina Milei followed by requesting the Court to lift the measure, which it did, ending the so-called “15-day gag order.” 

Recently, Lautaro Furfaro, CGFoE’s Senior Legal Researcher and Professor of International Human Rights Law at the University of Buenos Aires, interviewed Professor Roberto Gargarella – one of Latin America’s foremost constitutional scholars and a leading voice on freedom of expression and democratic theory – about judicial decisions threatening free speech in Argentina, broader democratic regression, and the challenges facing the right to protest in the region today.

Below is an excerpt; the full interview is available here.

Roberto Gargarella is a lawyer, sociologist, and Professor of Constitutional Theory and Political Philosophy at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella and of Constitutional Law at the University of Buenos Aires. Photo: courtesy of Roberto Gargarella

Lautaro Furfaro: The precautionary measure of prior restraint in favor of Karina Milei has been widely criticized in Argentina and globally. In your article “La mordaza de los quince días” (“The Fifteen-Day Gag Order”), you describe the decision as illustrating how an autocratic regime might operate. How would you compare the threats to rule of law in Argentina and the courts’ responses to what is happening in Brazil or the United States? 

Roberto Gargarella: The question is important, above all because it allows me to emphasize something that needs to be emphasized. American constitutionalism evolved in recognizable stages – its moment of “exploration”; its “foundational” moment; its social moment. Today we are facing a new moment or paradigm, which is one of democratic regression. This is something that is happening throughout the region, perhaps with different timings and expressions (and I include the United States here). We are facing political actions (typically from the Executive) and institutional responses (typically from the courts) that we did not expect. Political power takes advantage of its dominant position and the discrediting of the system to capture or gain control over the mechanisms that serve as checks on power; and the courts, (either for fear of being definitively colonized, or because they already are), tend to support rather than challenge the Executive’s initiatives.

Following your appeal, Karina Milei herself requested that the injunction be lifted. Do you interpret this withdrawal as an implicit acknowledgment of the measure’s legal flaws, or as a strategic move to prevent a stronger judicial statement on freedom of expression?

To tell the truth, I see the legal department within the government as an office where the distinctive traits of this administration are reproduced (perhaps to a greater extent than in other areas): improvisation, apathy, and clumsiness. Therefore, I find it difficult to see what happened as the product of a careful strategy: I would rather explain it as the result of the aforementioned unattractive traits.

To read the full interview, visit our website.

European Court of Human Rights
Google LLC v. Russia
Decision Date: July 8, 2025
The European Court of Human Rights held that Russia violated Articles 10 (freedom of expression) and 6 (fair trial) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) by imposing disproportionate fines on Google LLC for refusing to remove political content from YouTube and by compelling it to restore accounts of a sanctioned television channel. The Court found that these measures struck at the very heart of the Internet’s function as a forum for the free exchange of ideas and that the excessive fines could have a chilling effect. It also ruled that the domestic courts’ reasoning in both the administrative and civil proceedings was manifestly inadequate, violating Article 6(1) of the ECHR. It unanimously concluded that the sanctions and enforcement proceedings were disproportionate and not necessary in a democratic society.

Belgium
The Case of Schild & Vrienden (S&V)
Decision Date: June 20, 2025
A Belgian Court of Appeal upheld the conviction of several members of a far-right youth movement, for promoting racial discrimination, Holocaust denial, and incitement to hatred and violence. The case arose after a documentary revealed the movement’s closed social media groups where members shared racist, antisemitic, and violent content under the guise of humor. The Court found that these groups functioned as a structured association that intentionally disseminated hateful messages to incite discrimination and prepare for violence against racial minorities and Jewish communities. It rejected the defense that the content was merely jokes, emphasizing that the use of memes was a deliberate strategy to normalize racism. The Court also held the group’s leader responsible as a co-perpetrator for allowing Holocaust denial content to circulate in the virtual spaces he controlled. By recognizing delays in the trial, the Court confirmed the convictions but reduced some of the penalties.

Vandendriessche v. Meta Ireland
Decision Date: June 3, 2024
A Court of Appeal in Ghent, Belgium found that Meta unlawfully restricted the visibility of a Belgian politician’s Facebook page through “covert reach reduction,” more commonly known as shadowbanning. The case arose after the politician, a member of a far-right political party, observed a sharp drop in the organic reach of his posts and approached the Court, arguing that Meta had imposed a shadowban without informing him. The Court concluded that Meta’s actions significantly interfered with his ability to engage politically online and lacked sufficient transparency and redress. Although the Court found the shadowban had ended, it awarded the politician over €27,000 in damages for financial and reputational harm stemming from Meta’s earlier actions and labeling practices.

CGFoE Class at UBA: Freedom of Expression in International Human Rights Law. Continuing to engage with young legal scholars, CGFoE returns to the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) with a seminar on Freedom of Expression in International Human Rights Law. This Wednesday, Dr. Hawley Johnson, CGFoE’s Associate Director, and Anderson J. Dirocie De León, CGFoE’s Senior Legal and Policy Consultant, joined the class led by Lautaro Furfaro, Professor at UBA and Senior Legal Researcher at CGFoE. Their seminar covered the universal and regional freedom of expression standards, featuring CGFoE’s Special Collection papers on the European, African, and Inter-American systems. The class also discussed the “chilling effect” doctrine and prior censorship measures, drawing from Karina Milei’s Request for Prior Restraints (No. 1 and No. 2) and the interview with Roberto Gargarella as examples.

● EU: The Digital Prior Restraint: Applying Human Rights Safeguards to Upload Filters in the EU, by Emmanuel Vargas Penagos. In this article for Computer Law & Security Review, Emmanuel Vargas Penagos, a PhD researcher at Örebro University and co-director of El Veinte, examines the use of upload filters, regulated by EU laws, as a type of prior restraint. The article unpacks what upload filters are and how they can affect freedom of expression, turning to the case law of the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on prior restraints. The article then explains how EU secondary legislation and the CJEU case law approach both mandatory and voluntary upload filters and concludes by reviewing the institutional and procedural safeguards within the current EU legal framework from a human rights lens.

● US: The Press Leaves the Pentagon, by ​​Aida Alami. More on prior restraints: Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) covers the Pentagon’s new policy requiring reporters to sign a pledge agreeing to use only authorized materials and the media’s response: most outlets have refused to comply. Citing the landmark New York Times Co. v. United States, Aida Alami, James Madison Visiting Professor on First Amendment Issues at the Columbia School of Journalism, argues that the Pentagon’s goal is “obfuscation” of time-critical and consequential information and comes as the US conducts military action in the Caribbean. Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told CJR reporter Ivan L. Nagy that the new policy resembles “a classic case of unconstitutional prior restraint, and should therefore be vulnerable to legal challenge.”

● Ecuador: International Organizations Condemn the Repression of Protests. IFEX joins more than 140 civil society groups in calling on Ecuador to halt the use of disproportionate force against protesters, guarantee the right to peaceful assembly, and cease the persecution of human rights defense work. As Indigenous-led social protests sweep across the country’s many provinces, the government has deployed military and police convoys, which have used lethal force against demonstrators. The statement cites gross human rights violations: more than 282 people injured, 172 detained, 15 temporarily disappeared, and at least three killed, including Indigenous leader Efraín Fuerez and Indigenous woman Rosa Elena Paqui – the latter died of cardiorespiratory arrest due to tear gas inhalation.

● EU: Commission Adopts Its LGBTIQ+ Equality Strategy for 2026-2030. In the newly adopted LGBTIQ+ equality strategy for 2026-2030, the EU commits to support Member States in outlawing conversion therapy and combating online and offline anti-LGBTIQ+ hatred. The European Commission cites data indicating that 1 in 4 LGBTIQ+ individuals – and almost every second trans person – has experienced a form of conversion therapy as “physical or sexual violence, verbal abuse and humiliation.” Additionally, the Commission sets out to tackle cyberbullying – in protection of the LGBTIQ+ youth in particular – by adopting an EU action plan. The new strategy comes as Budapest remains at odds with Brussels over Hungary’s crackdown on the LGBTIQ+ community, with the top court of the EU yet to rule on the country’s 2021 “Propaganda Law.”

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

That Violates My Policies: AI Laws, Chatbots, and The Future of Expression. The Future of Free Speech (FFS), an independent, nonpartisan think tank based at Vanderbilt University, released a study on generative AI and its global impact on free expression and access to information. The report reviews the relevant laws and policies across six jurisdictions – the US, the EU, China, India, Brazil, and the Republic of Korea – as well as the practices of eight leading AI providers: Alibaba, Anthropic, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Mistral AI, OpenAI, and xAI. This study is the result of a year-long effort led by Jordi Calvet-Bademunt, Senior Research Fellow, Jacob Mchangama, Executive Director, and Isabelle Anzabi, Research Associate – all from FFS – in collaboration with local experts, who contributed chapters on several jurisdictions.

● Op-Ed: Amazon Cloud Outage Reveals Democratic Deficit in Relying on Big Tech, by Corinne Cath-Speth and Don Le. Writing for Tech Policy Press, Corinne Cath-Speth and Don Le, both of ARTICLE 19’s Global Team Digital, argue that this week’s Amazon Web Services outage is a grave warning. “These disruptions are not just technical issues; they are democratic failures,” Cath-Speth and Le underscore, calling for more diversification in cloud computing options and less dependence on them for critical public services.

● Job Opening at Systemic Justice: Lawyer. Systemic Justice, an NGO advancing racial, social, and economic justice through community-driven litigation, is seeking a lawyer to become a key member of its Legal Team. The position is full-time and remote, but the candidate must be based in the EU. Apply by November 2. Learn more here.

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