Global Freedom of Expression, Columbia University: Newsletter, 10 September 2026

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.

After Meta announced changes to its content moderation policies in January 2025, human rights experts sounded the alarm. Reduced platform protections, coupled with national restrictions in some states, would lead to “a clear erosion of possibilities for the LGBTI community to disseminate certain types of content,” CGFoE expert Dr. Joan Barata told Amnesty International. A surge in online hate speech followed.

Hungary became one example of what Barata warned against. By the time Meta overhauled its policies, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government had been curbing LGBTIQ+ rights for years. It banned legal gender recognition, adopted the so-called “Propaganda Law,” which restricted content depicting homosexuality or gender diversity for minors, went after Pride, and boosted anti-LGBTIQ+ hate during the 2026 elections.

This past spring, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that Hungary’s “Propaganda Law” was discriminatory and breached the right to freedom of expression and information under the EU Charter, systematically marginalizing LGBTIQ+ individuals—see CGFoE’s analysis of the landmark judgment below, along with the Hungarian Constitutional Court’s ruling on incitement to hatred through an announcement to burn the LGBTIQ+ flag.

Orbán-led targeting took its shape on the country’s most popular social media platform: Facebook. In a report released this week, Amnesty International concludes, based on January 2025-May 2026 findings, that Meta contributed to the human rights crisis faced by LGBTIQ+ people in Hungary “through policy decisions, failures of due diligence, shortcomings in risk mitigation and failures to effectively address harmful content.”

The report’s graphic, violent examples of hate speech are difficult to read. “This impacts my work and my everyday life,” one interviewee told Amnesty International. “It is very hard to bear with this abuse and we [trans people] don’t get any help.” The report also sheds light on Facebook’s algorithms at work—increasing the visibility of harmful content—and a growing tendency among LGBTIQ+ individuals to self-censor online.

With Orbán newly out of power in Hungary, meaningful change for the LGBTIQ+ community is slow, and anti-LGBTIQ+ laws have yet to be repealed. “Many people are still afraid to be open about who they are, about their families, or their relationships,” a Pride organizer told The Guardian, “and social stigma remains strong.”

Image credit: Anund Knutsen CC / Amnesty International

Court of Justice of the European Union
European Commission v. Hungary (“protection of children” amendments)
Decision Date: April 21, 2026
The Court of Justice of the European Union held that the Hungarian legislation laying down stricter measures against persons convicted of pedophilia and amending certain laws for the protection of children violated the right to freedom of expression and information guaranteed under Article 11 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. These amendments restricted minors’ access to content promoting or portraying gender identities that do not correspond to sex assigned at birth, sex reassignment, or homosexuality. The European Commission challenged the law, arguing it was discriminatory. The Court found the restrictions offensive and stigmatizing, because they treated non-cisgender and non-heterosexual people as harmful to the physical, mental and moral development of minors purely on the basis of their gender identity or sexual orientation. The Court further observed that the impugned measures restricted the rights of media service providers, advertising services, and educational services from portraying gender reassignment and homosexuality and therefore limited the right to impart information and, by extension, pluralism of media guaranteed under Article 11 of the Charter. The Court rejected the State’s argument that the limitations were necessary and proportionate, considering the best interests of the child and parents’ right to educate their children according to their beliefs, and found the limitations unjustified.

Hungary
The Case of the LGBTIQ+ Flag-Burning Announcement
Decision Date: December 10, 2025
The Constitutional Court of Hungary upheld the criminal conviction of a man who advertised an event at which LGBTIQ+ flags were to be burned, holding that stirring up hatred against a group injures the dignity of the people in it and is therefore not protected speech. The man, who led a movement promoting the right to self-determination of Hungarians living in the Carpathian Basin, had promoted a private commemoration of the national holiday of October 23 on two websites. Among the activities advertised were the burning of works by communist authors, target practice with Molotov cocktails, shooting at communist targets, and the burning of red, EU and LGBTIQ+ flags. A district court convicted him and placed him on probation for one year, a regional court acquitted him, and the Győr Court of Appeal restored the conviction, finding that putting the LGBTIQ+ community on the same footing as pedophiles and calling for its flag to be burned amounted to incitement to hatred. He asked the Constitutional Court to quash that judgment, arguing that his announcement was provocative political opinion protected by the Fundamental Law of Hungary and that pedophiles are not a protected group. The Court held that the crime is complete as soon as words are capable of stirring up hatred, with no need to show that violence or public disorder was likely to follow, because the harm lies in the injury to the dignity of the people targeted. It found that the Court of Appeal had recognized that freedom of expression was at stake and had weighed the reasons for limiting it, and it dismissed the complaint, leaving the conviction and the probation in place.

United Kingdom
Vince v. Associated Newspapers
Decision Date: July 15, 2026
The England and Wales Court of Appeal granted summary judgment in favor of an individual who sued a newspaper publisher for the “unfair processing” of his personal data under the UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Associated Newspapers published an article under the headline “Labour repays £100,000 to ‘sex pest’ [or ‘sex harassment’] donor,” concerning Labour donor Davide Serra and allegations of sexual harassment. The article also reported on another Labour donor, Dale Vince, including his participation in a Just Stop Oil protest in London. Photographs of Vince at the protest appeared beneath the headline. The newspaper later explained that the stories and photographs had been presented together because of space constraints. Vince brought proceedings against the newspaper, alleging unfair processing of his personal data. The lower court struck out the claim as an abuse of process and indicated that, had it not done so, it would have granted summary judgment to Associated Newspapers. The Court of Appeal reversed. It held that the common law principle established in Charleston v. News Group Newspapers Ltd—that, in defamation cases, an article must “be read together” rather than assessed by reference to selected portions—did not apply to Vince’s unfair-processing claim under the UK GDPR. The Court dismissed Associated Newspapers’ application to strike out the claim and granted summary judgment to Vince, with damages to be assessed.

UNESCO-Oxford Multilingual Massive Open Online Course on Freedom of Expression for Judicial Actors 2026. UNESCO and the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights have announced the 2026 edition of their Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on the regional and international standards related to freedom of expression. The MOOC, set to run between October 5 and November 9, 2026, offers a series of weekly online modules—in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian, Spanish, and Portuguese—and is free and open to judicial actors, journalists, scholars, and other professionals around the world. Learn more and register here.

● Bulgaria: Supreme Court Opens the Door to Legal Gender Recognition, Ending Years of Deadlock. ILGA-Europe and other groups defending LGBTIQ+ rights welcome the Bulgarian Supreme Court’s recent decision, which sided with four trans applicants seeking legal recognition of their gender identity, as “overdue and a great relief for trans people.” Citing the EU Charter and the European Convention on Human Rights, the judges affirmed that the right to a private life includes the right to define one’s own gender identity. “The rule of law in Bulgaria implies a universal equality of the dignity of all human beings, including transgender people,” the judges held.

● Europe: Mapping Media Freedom Monitoring Briefing 2026. Between January and June 2026, the Media Freedom Rapid Response (MFRR) recorded 736 attacks on 1,174 journalists and media workers across EU member states and candidate countries. The attacks included verbal abuse and threats (most common), obstruction of journalistic activity, physical assaults, and deprivation of liberty, among others. The MFRR documented at least 11 concerning legislative developments impacting press freedom, with Georgia adopting the most restrictive measures targeting the media and civil society with foreign funding.

● New from Media Defence: Breaking Ground Impact Series. Media Defence, an international human rights organization providing legal defense to journalists, has launched the Breaking Ground series on efforts that make a tangible difference for press freedom worldwide—through legal cases, initiatives, or partnerships. The series opens with a case study of Ripostes: established by the Fonds pour une Presse Libre and Media Defence in response to an increasing number of “gag lawsuits” in France, Ripostes is the country’s first legal aid fund dedicated to supporting independent media.

This Tuesday, September 8, following the 100th consecutive day of the “Flamingo Revolution” in Tirana, police clashed with protesters, blocking their march to parliament.

Background & Demands: The movement began as a campaign against the construction of a luxury resort in a protected coastal nature reserve, a project linked to Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner. Critics say it would cause irreversible environmental damage to over 1000 species, including endangered pink flamingoes, and restrict public access to the coast; preliminary works have reportedly destroyed nesting sites of birds and loggerhead turtles. Demands have since broadened to the resignation of Prime Minister Edi Rama, in power since 2013.

Significance: The protest movement—Albania’s largest since the fall of the communist regime—has sustained nightly mobilization for more than 100 days, presenting a systemic challenge to a long-governing party. 100,000-200,000 joined earlier protests.

State Response: On September 8, as lawmakers returned from summer recess, police blocked marchers from reaching parliament. Protesters threw eggs and tomatoes at officers and plastic bottles at vehicles with lawmakers. Several were escorted to police stations, including journalist Shpend Gashi. Dozens were detained at earlier rallies, with reports of injuries and police deploying pepper spray and a water cannon. By June 29, 151 protesters had been referred for criminal prosecution.

FoE Violations: The Albanian Helsinki Committee had previously condemned disproportionate police violence against protesters. The European Federation of Journalists and nine other press freedom organizations flagged drastic deterioration of media freedom and civic space in Albania since the protests began: journalists have faced violence from both police and protesters, detention, obstruction of reporting, and smear campaigns. As part of escalating digital censorship, dozens of activists’ Instagram accounts have reportedly been deleted.

“This Is How We Lived Here”: Documenting 16 Years in Hungary under Orbán, by Edit Inotai. The Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN) tells about an oral history project archiving the lived experiences of Hungarians under Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party. “These stories are vivid examples of what democratic backsliding and the emptying of democratic institutions can really do to people’s everyday lives,” sociologist Luca Varadi, who launched the project together with her colleague, told BIRN. “Not just in Hungary, but anywhere.”

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