Freedom of Expression: Inter-American Standards and Their Transformative Impact

Director of the UNESCO Chair on Freedom of Expression at the Universidad de Los Andes, Co-Chair of Meta’s Oversight Board, and Former Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression of the IACHR, Catalina Botero-Marino contributed this chapter to the volume on The Impact of the Inter-American Human Rights System: Transformations on the Ground (New York, 2024). The chapter lays out how the current freedom of expression standards – including those on speech about the issues of public interest and prohibitions of prior and indirect censorship, among others – came to be established within the Inter-American Human Rights System. The chapter then focuses on the transformative influence that two of those standards have had on domestic legal systems: “the standard regarding the limits of criminal law and the standard regarding the scope and nature of the right to access public information.”