Category: Freedom of Expression

Queen’s University Belfast n’est pas Charlie Hebdo; instead, it says nothing

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| Freedom of Expression, Universities

Loose talk costs lives - via Padraig Reidy has reported that Queen’s University Belfast has cancelled a Charlie Hebdo conference, citing security fears. Áine McMahon also has the story in the Irish Times; and there is a short report on the BBC website. This is disgraceful. The symposium was entitled “Understanding Charlie: New perspectives on contemporary citizenship after Charlie Hebdo“; and, according to its call for papers (pdf), its aim was to invite the disciplines of the humanities and social sciences to respond to the social ruptures that followed the January 7 attack on the Charlie Hebdo newspaper in Paris. There can be no greater irony than the censorship of a conference devoted to censorship. In particular, the call hoped that the following questions would be addressed:

Can we construct a global concept of freedom of speech? What role should censorship or ‘self-censorship’ play in contemporary societies, if any? How do we understand the propensity to ‘offend’ in a society that is home to diverse belief systems? What merits a ‘march’, and what are the merits of ‘marching’? Is satire cross-cultural, and how can we renegotiate the parameters of satire in the light of multiculturalism? Where do we draw the line between freedom of speech and incitement to hatred?

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University free speech rankings in the UK and the US

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| Academic Freedom, Freedom of Expression, Universities

Spiked Free Speech on CampusFor the first Free Speech University Rankings (FSUR) in the UK, Spiked ranked the policies and actions of universities and students’ unions, for free speech purposes, using a traffic-light system – red is bad; amber has chilled speech; green means a hands-off approach to free speech. An overall ranking for an institution is given as an average of the two (university and students’ union) rankings. FSUR is the first step in a campaign by Spiked, in partnership with students around the UK, against free speech restrictions on campus in the UK.

I wonder how Trinity College Dublin would do under the FSUR heads of assessment:…

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Mobile and internet privacy

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| Freedom of Expression, Privacy

In honour of European Consumer Day today, and World Day Against Cyber-censorship earlier this week, two privacy reports have caught my eye. Privacy is concerned as much with what we wish to keep private as it is with how we control what others do with our private data. Both reports cover both issues. First, the Article 29 Working Party (the co-ordinating group of EU data protection commissioners) have published an opinion addressing the key data protection risks of mobile apps (press release | opinion). Mobile devices increasingly store larger and larger amounts of personal data, and this poses many risks for individual privacy, both in terms of keeping the data private and secure, and in terms of what developers can do with the data collected by their apps. The Working Party recommend that all those in the app ecosystem should understand their own responsibilities, but they also acknowledge that, to achieve the highest standards of privacy and data protection, collaboration with other parties in the app ecosystem is necessary.

Mobile apps are simply one of a plethora of modern technological challenges to privacy. Many of the others are addressed in a new UNESCO publication (cover pictured above left): Global survey on Internet privacy and freedom of expression.…

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#Cameron to #Leveson: LOL

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| Freedom of Expression, Press Council

Cameron & LevesonOne of the most entertaining pieces of evidence that Lord Justice Leveson heard during his inquiry’s hearings into the culture, practice and ethics of the press concerned UK Prime Minister David Cameron‘s understanding of the popular sms abbreviation LOL. He had thought it stood for “lots of love“, and had used it to sign off his texts to Rebekah Brooks (sometime Editor of the News of the World, and the Sun, and CEO of News International), until he discovered that it in fact stands for “laugh out loud” (see transcript for 11 May 2012, p76 (pdf)). Given his rejection on Thursday afternoon of the main press regulation recommendations in Lord Justice Leveson’s Report (also here), published on Thursday morning, he is obviously laughing out loud at the Leveson Inquiry, not showering it with lots of love.

In essence, Leveson recommends that the press ought to be overseen by an independent self-regulatory body, with statutory underpinning, and governed by an independent Board. In so doing, he is adopting the basic structure of the Press Council of Ireland and the Office of the Press Ombudsman which were established by the media industry in Ireland and given statutory recognition pursuant to section 44 of, and Schedule 2 to, the Defamation Act, 2009 (also here), and described in great detail by John Horgan, the Press Ombudsman, to the Inquiry.…

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Presidential freedom of expression

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| Freedom of Expression
Memorial
The Great Hunger Memorial, St Luke’s Church, Liverpool, where President Higgins delivered his remarks.
(Image via Wikipedia)

Last week, the President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, in response to questions from reporters during an official visit to Liverpool in the UK, made a number of unscripted remarks about a current political controversy in Ireland. The Presidency of Ireland is not an executive office in the same way as the Presidents of the US and France are – Ireland is a parliamentary democracy like the UK where the head of the executive is the Taoiseach (Prime Minister). Rather, the Presidency of Ireland is a largely ceremonial office, in much the same way as the Presidents of Italy and Germany are. As a consequence, the President’s remarks were seems as political and controversial. He denied overstepping the mark, and robustly defended his comments, but the incident has raised questions as to the limit of the President’s avowedly evolving role. Two articles recently published in the Irish Times neatly encapsulate the competing views. On the one hand, David Gwynn Morgan, Professor of Law Emeritus, UCC, argued that it was never intended for the president to act as a more effective opposition leader:

Pitfalls of pushing out presidential boundaries

… the issue is whether he went beyond his proper authority.

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We need a Privacy Bill, just not this one

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| Freedom of Expression, Privacy

Image of Examiner op-edThe drumbeats for privacy legislation can once again be heard around Leinster House. I did a radio interview with Matt Cooper on Today FM’s The Last Word yesterday evening; and I have an op-ed about it in today’s Irish Examiner (.doc here):

Flawed privacy bill offers us no protection

… the bill is unnecessary to cover the publication of the topless photographs, as Irish law already provides a remedy. Worse, the bill goes too far in dealing with press invasions of privacy; and it fails to deal with many other important aspects of privacy. …

A privacy bill is necessary. However, the one being proposed by the minister is not it. It will need a lot of work if it is to protect our privacy properly.

Links: here are some links to the cases and materials to which I refer in the article:

The Privacy Bill, 2006 is here. An op-ed I wrote at the time is here.

The Minister’s Press Release is here.

I have blogged about the photograph of the GAA player, Sinnott v Carlow Nationalist, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

The nursing home case is Cogley v RTÉ [2005] 4 IR 79, [2005] IEHC 180 (8 June 2005).…

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YouTube, Facebook, and the responsibilities of intermediary gatekeepers

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| Censorship, Cyberlaw, Digital Rights, Freedom of Expression, judges, law school

YouTube logo, via YouTubeIn my previous post, I argued that, as a matter of principle, the controversial American anti-Islamic video should not be censored. The most obvious form of censorship comes from government action, such as legislation banning speech, but that does not arise in this case. Less obvious, but no less insidious, was the White House request to Google to re-consider whether the video breached YouTube rules. This was not a formal ban, and Google declined to take the video down in the US, but it did block access to it in in Egypt and Libya. This raises two important questions about the structure of free speech. First, in the online world, where most of us access the internet through a range of intermediaries, government censorship does not necessarily need to target the disfavoured speech; it need only target the intermediaries. Very few US companies would feel able to decline a request like that from the White House, and Google are to be commended for standing firm in those circumstances. Second, these intermediaries now have a great deal of practical power over online expression – not only can they be co-opted by government as agents of state censorship, but they also have the capacity to act as censors in their own rights, as Google did in their unilateral action to block access in the Middle East.…

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Assassination and censorship

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| Censorship, Freedom of Expression

Ambassador Stevens, via the BBC websiteAssassination is the extreme form of censorship.

George Bernard Shaw

Given my recent post about cross-border hate speech, I was unsurprised to find that freedom of expression is once again in the cross-hairs in the wake of the assassination last Tuesday of J Christopher Stevens, the US Ambassador to Lybia (pictured), and three of his colleagues. The attack seems to have been sparked by a controversial American anti-Islamic movie, and there have been calls for those responsible for the movie to face criminal charges. On the Opinio Juris blog, Peter Spiro [hat tip Volokh] seeks to chart a means by which this might be done in the US without running afoul of the First Amendment, making a point similar to that made by Banks and discussed in my earlier post:

And the First Amendment? Call me a relativist. We have some pretty good empirical data from the scores of other countries that ban hate speech (in part through signing on to article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights) that a permissive approach to hate speech is not a prerequisite to functioning democracy. On the contrary, our European friends would argue that democracy is better served by banning such material.

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