Global Freedom of Expression, Columbia University: Newsletter, 17 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.

In his headline-making letter published this past Saturday, CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei called on the AI industry to slow down to address emerging risks. “A coordinated pacing strategy would give frontier AI developers the time to do this vital work,” he wrote, stressing: “without sacrificing commercial advantage or the United States’ lead in AI.” Amodei urged “democracies” to jointly devise common safety standards, which will require “government support.” He said, “[W]e owe it to humanity.”

The mention of human rights, however, was conspicuously missing.

US President Donald Trump responded by dismissing AI safety fears as a “hoax.” The only “guardrails” needed for AI were a “strong and smart” president, he said.

A president whose administration has been undermining the international rules-based order built over the past 80 years, Agnès Callamard, Amnesty International’s Secretary General and CGFoE’s former Director, reminded us. While welcoming the US-based AI developers’ call for regulation, Callamard described Amodei’s proposal as “self-serving self-regulation.” She suggested the global AI industry rely on the lessons of the very system Trump has been trying to destroy: international law.

The AI risks acknowledged in Amodei’s letter point to the near future. But human rights groups have long flagged the harms that unregulated AI is already causing: algorithmic discrimination, privacy violations, and disinformation distorting public debate. According to the Thomson Reuters Foundation, only 14% of AI companies evaluate their product’s impact on privacy, and a paltry 7% conduct human rights assessments.

This Monday, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk addressed all states and companies driving the AI race. “AI safety must mean more than the reliability of the technical product in question,” Türk stated. “It means actively protecting people, communities, institutions and future generations.” It means an approach grounded in human rights protections—not commercial advantage, geopolitics, or technological progress determined by a handful of those at the “frontier.”

We may be on the verge of change, indeed. The question is: What will be guiding it?

A protester in San Francisco, September 26, 2025. Photo credit: Anders Eidesvik / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

European Court of Human Rights
Green Alliance v. Bulgaria
Decision Date: February 17, 2026
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held that a legal framework permitting a national security agency to covertly place its own officers, without the use of technical surveillance equipment, into private organizations and certain regulated professions violated the right to respect for private life, home, and correspondence. An environmental non-governmental organization, which could theoretically be targeted by such agents under the domestic rules without ever being notified, argued that the aforementioned legal framework lacked sufficient safeguards against arbitrary or abusive use, and unsuccessfully challenged its validity before Bulgaria’s domestic courts. The ECtHR argued that the mere existence of the framework interfered with the organization’s rights, since no effective remedy existed that was capable of dispelling reasonable suspicion that the organization might be, or might have been, targeted. Applying principles it had previously developed in relation to covert surveillance measures such as the interception of communications, the Court concluded that the domestic rules failed to define with sufficient clarity the grounds and categories of persons who could be targeted, imposed no time-limits on the duration of such measures, provided for no independent authorization or supervision of their use, and offered no effective remedy to challenge them. It considered that these cumulative shortcomings entailed that the legal framework did not meet the minimum quality-of-law safeguards required to protect against arbitrariness and abuse. Thus, it held that the framework violated Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (right to privacy).

United States
The Authors Guild v. National Endowment for the Humanities
Decision Date: May 7, 2026
The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York granted summary judgment to a group of humanities grantees and scholarly associations, permanently enjoining the mass termination of more than 1,400 grants, totaling over $100 million, that the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) had already awarded. The terminations followed a series of presidential executive orders. The U.S. DOGE Service executed them, using keyword searches and the artificial-intelligence tool ChatGPT to flag grants perceived to involve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) or to be associated with the prior administration, then issued cancellation notices over the NEH Acting Chairman’s signature. The Court held that the terminations were ultra vires because DOGE exercised authority Congress had never conferred it, that they violated the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (which protects freedom of speech)—as the terminations were a form of viewpoint discrimination and discrimination based on perceived political association against privately funded expression—, and that they violated the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment. The Court granted the plaintiffs’ motion for summary judgment, denied the defendants’ cross-motion, declared the mass termination unlawful, unconstitutional, and of no legal effect, and permanently enjoined its enforcement as to the plaintiffs and a certified class.

The New York Times v. Department of Defense
Decision Date: March 20, 2026
The United States District Court for the District of Columbia granted summary judgment in favor of The New York Times, holding that a Department of Defense Policy violated both the First Amendment, which protects freedom of speech and of the press, and the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees that no person shall be deprived of liberty without due process of law, of the U.S. Constitution. The Policy authorized the denial or revocation of press credentials granting journalists physical access to the Department’s headquarters at the Pentagon if a journalist was “reasonably determined to pose a security or safety risk.” Seven Times reporters and most other credentialed journalists refused to sign an acknowledgment of the new Policy, and their credentials were revoked. The Department subsequently issued credentials to individuals and outlets that had expressed support for the Trump administration. The Court concluded that the Policy was unconstitutionally vague because it lacked objective, workable criteria, imposed viewpoint-discriminatory restrictions in a nonpublic forum, and deprived the journalists of a protected liberty interest without constitutionally sufficient notice. Having found success on the merits, irreparable harm, and that the equities and public interest favored relief, the Court vacated the challenged provisions, permanently enjoined their enforcement, and ordered reinstatement of the credentials previously held by the reporters.

SEP 28: Disconnected Justice—The Non-Implementation of Internet Shutdown Judgments. Media Defence, in collaboration with Access Now, will mark the International Day for Universal Access to Information by hosting a discussion on internet shutdowns: even though courts across continents have ruled them unlawful, many states continue to impose internet blackouts. The panel will include lawyers who have litigated internet shutdown cases. September 28, 2026. 1:30 PM UK / 1:30 PM Nigeria / 7:30 AM Colombia / 8:30 AM New York / 6:00 PM India. Online. Register here.A Murder in Malta: One Woman Journalist Against Powerful (and Corrupt) Men, by Anastasiia Vorozhtsova. In this article for Interruptrr, a feminist foreign policy publication run by Elmira Bayrasli, CGFoE Editor Anastasiia Vorozhtsova explains how Daphne Caruana Galizia became Malta’s most prominent—and most often attacked—journalist and what the recent acquittal of business tycoon Yorgen Fenech, the alleged mastermind behind her murder, means for women in the media globally. 

● Serbia: Use of Spyware Against Opposition and Dissenting Voices Affects Election Quality. The SHARE Foundation and the Citizen Lab recently revealed that Serbia’s largest documented ​wave of spyware infection to date has targeted at least 14 civil society and opposition members, including those in the student protest movement. UN Special Rapporteur on the right to freedom of opinion and expression Leopoldo Maldonado Gutiérrez and other UN experts condemned the deployment of spyware, especially in the context of an upcoming election, which “fosters a climate of fear and creates a profound chilling effect for democratic participation.”

● North Korea: Students Executed for Watching Foreign Videos as Surveillance and Restrictions Intensify. CIVICUS reports on the scale of censorship in North Korea, as the authorities intensify their crackdown on access to foreign content. Two university students from South Hwanghae were publicly executed recently for secretly watching and distributing South Korean videos and keeping written notes critical of the government. Other disturbing cases include arrests over access to K-drama, increased inspections of devices at universities nationwide, phone surveillance, registrations for DVD owners, and a ban on gatherings of more than three people in border areas.

● Türkiye: Digital Lockdown Silencing the Public in the Name of Public Order, by Yaman Akdeniz, Ozan Güven. The Freedom of Expression Association (IFÖD) published the English translation of its latest report, EngelliWeb 2025, on digital rights violations in Türkiye—“a digital state of emergency targeting every segment of society on the grounds of ‘public order’ and ‘national security’.” The report shows that in 2025, access blocking and bandwidth throttling became routine instruments of repression, with other censorship practices—content removals, VPN blocking, preliminary injunctions, criminal investigations— forming “a multilayered digital control regime.”

Marking 53 years since the coup that started Augusto Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship, protesters clashed with the police. Almost 300 people were detained.

Background: On September 11, Chileans commemorate the 1973 coup that led to Augusto Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship, which resulted in over 40,000 victims, including more than 2,000 executed and 1,469 forcibly disappeared. This year, for the first time since the return to democracy in 1990, the new government of far-right President José Antonio Kast held no official commemoration. Mass security forces were deployed to the streets. “We are at a democratic act, in a [state] that claims to be democratic,” a protester said. “However, we have everything fenced off; we cannot move around; we cannot commemorate and remember our fallen.”

Significance: Thousands joined commemorative events nationwide. Chilean civil society has raised concerns about President Kast’s “silent dismantling” of institutions advancing transitional justice, memory, and reparations and has petitioned the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for reinforced monitoring of Chile.

State Response: The nationwide security operation involved nearly 7,000 officers. In Santiago, protesters reportedly threw stones and sticks; police responded with gas and water cannons. 284 people were detained nationally, including 31 minors.

FoE Violations: With mass security deployment, the authorities treated an annual civic mobilization as a major security threat—instead of an exercise of protected freedom of expression and assembly rights. At a protest on September 3 in Santiago, police also deployed tear gas and water cannons; an officer physically attacked photojournalist Juan González, who covered the protest. On September 6, Benjamín Lillo was arrested while covering the commemorative march of thousands to the Central Cemetery of Santiago.

The Fight to Save Journalism in Georgia. In this podcast episode for Columbia Journalism Review, co-hosts Emily Bell and Heather Chaplin speak with journalists Lika Antadze, Executive Director of Chai Khana, and Nino Bakradze, Editor and Co-founder of iFact, on how independent media organizations in Georgia are standing up to an authoritarian government together.

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