Conflict of rights and interests

Cartooning for Peace and Cartoonists Rights - network organizations with missions to defend the rights of cartoonists globally - published a report on the challenges of censorship that cartoonists face today. Based on the monitoring and case studies from between 2020 and 2022, the report reviews increased censorship in authoritarian states, hate speech, online trolling, disinformation, and manipulation that targets press cartoonists. The report also looks at criminalization and displacement and how the two became the new normal for many cartoonists. “When you question authority, when you hold up a mirror to authority, that’s what makes you a satirist or a cartoonist,” says Rachita Taneja, a cartoonist from India. “And it is essential that in any healthy democracy that satirists should not face censorship [...]. [O]nly a very insecure and very authoritarian government would silence satirists.” Concluding with recommendations for cartoonists’ organizations, governments, and social media, the report’s authors intend to follow up with a more detailed analytical report in 2025. 

“This Article endeavors to catalog and resolve cases involving competing free speech values, and then applies its solutions to violent and disruptive protests. Almost every First Amendment case can be framed as implicating free speech values on both sides of the First Amendment equation. Government action directly abridges speech, but government inaction may allow private parties too much control over others’ speech. First Amendment doctrine, which generally protects speech only from suppression by state actors, can thus compromise the very free speech values that form the rationales for the First Amendment. Scholars and litigants have argued that government regulation of speech, to preserve free speech values, is necessary in areas ranging from campaign finance, to access to media resources, to bigoted speech. This Article argues that strict adherence to a formal state action doctrine should resolve most, but not all, clashes between free speech doctrine and values. A robust application of the state action doctrine—where government interference to preserve speech values is not considered as part of the First Amendment calculus—also best advances both formal and substantive First Amendment equality. This Article proceeds in three parts. First, the Article chronicles the Supreme Court’s approach to cases involving competing free speech values. The Article then demonstrates why the state action doctrine, with its associated formal equality and neutrality principles, will ultimately advance free speech values. Finally, the Article considers political protests, and distinguishes between prosecution of violent protesters, which should be encouraged, and legislation criminalizing disruptive protest tactics, which may be unconstitutional.”

The Declaration jointly developed by Access Now, ARTICLE 19, Mnemonic, the Center for Democracy and Technology, JustPeace Labs, Digital Security Lab Ukraine, Centre for Democracy and Rule of Law (CEDEM), and the Myanmar Internet Project, sets out guidelines to help platforms protect human rights before, during, and after a crisis. The motivation for the Declaration stemmed from an understanding that “[i]n situations of armed conflicts and other crises, people use social media and messaging platforms to document human rights abuses or war crimes, access information, mobilize for action, and crowdsource humanitarian assistance. But governments and other actors leverage these same platforms to spread disinformation and hate speech, incite violence, and attack or surveil activists, journalists, and dissidents.” The partner organizations hope that the Declaration will help “advance consistent and rights-respecting principles for companies to respond appropriately to crises and meet their obligations and responsibilities under international human rights law.”

The report “provides a global overview of the dynamics characterizing hate speech online and some of the measures that have been adopted to counteract and mitigate it, highlighting good practices that have emerged at the local and global level. It also places particular emphasis on social and nonregulatory mechanism that can help to counter the production, dissemination and impact of hateful messages online.”

"For many  years  now, an apparent  conundrum  has lurked just  beneath the  surface among European jurisdictions.  In  the Common Law countries – namely  the United Kingdom and  Ireland – full court decisions, including  the names of  the parties, are generally accessible  to  the public.  In  the  rest of Europe, governed by  the civil law, however, such decisions are normally published only with the names of the parties redacted. The apparent rationale for the former is the idea of open justice, while in the latter group of countries the idea of personal data protection reigns supreme."

“This webinar, organized by the Bonavero Institute, UNESCO, and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism (Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford), discusses the challenges for freedom of expression, access to information, privacy and related rights posed by measures adopted by governments around the world in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The panel is made up of Justice Edward Amoako Asante (President of the ECOWAS Court of Justice), Judge Darian Pavli (Judge at the European Court of Human Rights), Mr. Joan Barata (UNESCO expert; Center for Internet and Society and Cyber Policy Center, Stanford University) and Ms. Jennifer Robinson (prominent lawyer with expertise in media law, public law and international law) as speakers, and is chaired by Professor Kate O’ Regan (Director of the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights).”

“In this public talk hosted by the Center for Media, Data and Society at the CEU School of Public Policy, UN Special Rapporteur David Kaye discussed global threats to freedom of expression. He was introduced by Sejal Parmar, Assistant Professor at the CEU Department of Legal Studies. The agenda of the talk and themes discussed in his lecture and in the ensuing Q&A spanned the following: global threats to freedom of expression; how to promote protective measures to free speech, hate speech and access to information; protection of whistleblowers; role and liability of intermediaries and social media companies; surveillance; digital security; transparency; the Bernstein case, Apple v. FBI; code speech; different national security measures on freedom of expression, and the UN standard on the issue; Facebook posts as reasons for prosecution for incitement; Article 19; the right to be forgotten; content discrimination in relation to freedom of expression; Article 19 to promote government transparency and access to information; the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction Movement and its academic implications; academic freedom; how the Special Rapporteur prioritizes over requests and communications; and, contempt of court in relation to freedom of expression.”

"These Principles set out an appropriate balance between the human right to freedom of expression, guaranteed in UN and regional human rights instruments, as well as nearly every national constitution, and the need to protect individual reputations, widely recognised by international human rights instruments and the law in countries around the world. The Principles are based on the premise that, in a democratic society, freedom of expression must be guaranteed and may be subject only to narrowly drawn restrictions which are necessary to protect legitimate interests, including reputations. In particular, they set out standards
of respect for freedom of expression to which legal provisions designed to protect reputations should, at a minimum, conform."

"It is legitimate for states to exempt information whose release would be prejudicial to national security from their disclosure laws. But in order to insure that this exemption is not abused it is important to develop an acceptably narrow definition of what constitutes national security. To this end, the Centre for Law and Democracy has produced a paper examining how national security should be defined in the context of information disclosure. The paper was produced as a contribution to the “Principles on National Security and the Right to Information” currently being developed by the Open Society Initiative."

“Once hailed as beacons of democracy, social media platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter now find themselves credited with its decay. Amidst a rising global techlash and growing calls for digital constitutionalism, this article develops a typology of the diverse forms of governance enabled by social media platforms and examines the contestability of human rights law in addressing the accountability deficits that characterize the platform economy. The article examines two interrelated forms of social media governance in particular: content moderation, encompassing the practices through which social media companies determine the permissibility and visibility of online content on their platforms; and data surveillance, encompassing the practices through which social media companies process personal data in accordance with their extractivist business models. Recognizing that human rights law is a vocabulary of governance with the potential to both restrain and legitimate particular relations of power within the platform economy, this article critically examines two rival conceptions of human rights law – marketized and structural – that may be relied upon to address the accountability shortfalls that pervade the contemporary social media ecosystem. The article ultimately argues in favour of a more structural conception of human rights law, one characterized by an openness to positive state intervention to safeguard public and collective values such as media pluralism and diversity as well as a systemic lens that strives to take into account imbalances of power in the social media ecosystem and the effects of state and platform practices on the social media environment as a whole.”