Articles for tag: Fake News, Indien, Indische Verfassung, Redefreiheit, Supreme Court of India

The Bombay High Court Dismisses the Ministry of Truth

In 2023, the Indian central government established a Fact Check Unit to monitor online content related to ‘any business of the Central Government’ and order the takedown of any information that it considered ‘fake or false or misleading.’ The FCU itself was envisaged as a public body and a part of the central government. As it seems, the Indian central government wanted to depart from existing liability rules protecting platforms in all cases of online criticism of the Indian State. As the FCU would be the last arbiter of what could be said online in India about the central government, the amendment instituted what could be called a ‘Ministry of Truth’. This was struck down by the Bombay High Court.

8. Oktober 2024

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Why Institutional Reputation Matters

Mexico is about to adopt a constitutional amendment to reform the judicial branch. While framed as an attempt to restore the legitimacy and independence of the judiciary, it is, in reality, aimed at capturing the judiciary. In this blogpost, I discuss a key strategy that enabled this judicial overhaul: the President’s persistent and systematic defamatory attacks on the judiciary. I argue that to facing the threat of institutional defamation, we must recognize the importance of the right to reputation.

6. September 2024

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A Standoff Between the Monarchy and the People

On 7 August 2024, Thailand’s Constitutional Court ordered the dissolution of the Move Forward Party (MFP), the country’s most popular political party. The dissolution follows a decision in January, when the Constitutional Court ruled that the MFP’s campaign to amend section 112 of the Penal Code (the lèse-majesté law) constituted an attempt to overthrow the democratic regime with the king as head of state (DRKH), which is considered a fundamental principle of the Thai state. The decision is another chapter in a long-standing conflict over the scope of the criminal offense of lèse-majesté, the extent of freedom of expression, and ultimately, the character of the Thai state.

6. September 2024

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Prison for Fake News

In Cyprus, a new legislative proposal introduces a prison sentence of up to one year and/or a fine of up to EUR 3,000. I argue that criminally punishing fake news is absolutely horrifying for free speech, for media pluralism, and for democracy. Criminalizing fake news has a “chilling effect” and it causes a self-censorship by media, civil society organizations, and average citizens. Moreover, the concept of fake news is highly ambiguous and its criminalization is counterproductive as it is not reducing the problematic content but “often draws more attention to it.”

12. Juli 2024

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Online Speech at the US Supreme Court in Moody v. Netchoice

The First Amendment of the US Constitution raises some of the most difficult legal hurdles for regulating the global digital public sphere today. In Moody v. Netchoice, the US Supreme Court heard appeals from two judgments, an appeal from a decision of the Fifth Circuit declaring that Texas’ social media law H.B. 20 did not violate the First Amendment, and an appeal from a decision of the Eleventh Circuit finding Florida’s social media law S.B. 7072, instead, unconstitutional. These laws are similar in that they both attempt to impose must-carry and non-discrimination obligations on social media platforms, which in practice amounts to requiring them not to discriminate against conservative users’ posts. The compatibility of these two laws with the First Amendment cuts across a plethora of crucial issues on the future of social media regulation which the court could, but didn’t fully, address.

11. Juli 2024

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A Legal Trap for Freedom of Expression

More than seven years ago, 406 academics and researchers have been permanently dismissed from their positions at Turkish universities for signing a peace petition condemning the military operations by Turkish security forces in areas heavily populated by the Kurdish minority. The case raises critical questions about the limitations of international human rights bodies in safeguarding freedom of expression. In this blog, I demonstrate how the pragmatic considerations of the Council of Europe (CoE) contributed to the creation of a judicial trap disguised as a legal remedy.

5. Juli 2024

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Exercising Power from the Outside

Since 2019, anti-Islam non-parliamentary activists have explored the limits to freedom of speech in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and the Netherlands through their provocative Quran desecration acts. Using the non-parliamentarian arena to exercise power from a position of minority, the far-right activist Rasmus Paludan and his party were able to effectively push the Danish constitutional boundaries, while at the same time affecting the geopolitical situation. While the protests so far only have had legal repercussions regarding blasphemy and freedom of speech in Denmark, it clearly demonstrates that non-parliamentary far-right activists also hold certain legislative powers.

9. Februar 2024

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Free Speech in the Shadow of the Israel-Gaza War

Since Hamas’ attack on October 7, and the war between Israel and Gaza that ensued, constraints on speech have become more widespread in Israel, both on the formal and informal level. Restrictions on anti-war demonstrations, police violence toward protestors, investigations and indictments for “incitement to terrorism” or “identifying with a terrorist organization” and other speech-restricting measures, have become the norm. At the much less discussed, informal level, Israeli media has largely embraced a non-critical position, failing to provide audiences with information as to the situation in Gaza, and providing almost all the analysis from an internal Israeli perspective. While this cannot be construed as a formal restriction on speech, it nevertheless speaks to the informal mechanisms that render criticism unpalatable during times of war.

24. Januar 2024

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Watchdog Watching Too Closely

In December 2017, readers of the largest and maybe also the most esteemed Finnish newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat, were surprised to find an article which, among others, showed excerpts of classified, red-labelled documents. Very little was publicly known about the workings of that special center, part of the military intelligence, situated in a faraway resort. More than five years later, on January 27th, 2023, the Helsinki District Court found both of the journalists guilty of criminal disclosure charges. Put simply, the court’s decision is that media may report abuses of power. However, an interest to attract readers only is not enough to justify the disclosure.

16. Februar 2023

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Interfering with Free Speech and the Fate of Turkey

On 21 April 1998, the then mayor of İstanbul, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was sentenced to one year (subsequently reduced to ten months) in prison and a hefty fine by the State Security Court of Diyarbakır for “incitement to hatred and hostility on grounds of religious discrimination”. His criminal act was that of reading two provocative verses from the poem “Divine Army” by Cevat Örnek (“the minarets are bayonets, the domes are helmets / mosques are our barracks, the faithful our soldiers”) during a rally of the Islamist Welfare Party (of “Strasbourg fame”) in 1997. Twenty-five years after the aforementioned rally, Turkey experienced a free speech case involving another conservative-leaning political figure on the rise: on 14 December 2022, İstanbul’s mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu was sentenced by İstanbul’s 7th Criminal Court of First Instance to a term of imprisonment of two years, seven months and fifteen days for criminal defamation.

5. Januar 2023

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