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Advancing understanding of the norms and institutions
that best protect the free flow of information and expression.
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Dear Friends,
At CGFoE’s 10th Anniversary celebration and the 2024 Prize Award Ceremony on April 25, 2024, our esteemed guests Aryeh Neier and Elena Kostyuchenko gave keynote addresses. Aryeh Neier, President Emeritus of the Open Society Foundations, spoke at the day’s opening session. Through the lens of his decades-long human rights work, he reflected on challenges to freedom of expression today in the US and globally.
“We have contradictory developments. We have, on the one hand, regional court systems in Europe, Latin America, and Africa, that have made great strides in the protection of freedom of expression. [...] On the other hand, we have a number of large countries which have been particularly repressive in the recent past.”
Read Aryeh Neier’s full speech here.
Elena Kostyuchenko, journalist, activist, and author of I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country, addressed the audience at the 2024 CGFoE Prize Award Ceremony. She spoke from her experience of standing up for human rights in Russia, of her numerous arrests and reporting for Novaya Gazeta, Russia’s last major independent newspaper that was shut down in March 2022.
“Freedom of expression is a fragile thing. Freedom of expression requires vigilant protection. Freedom of expression demands faith in people. And that’s the hardest part. It’s hard to speak when you are hurting. It’s even harder to listen. [...] But conversation is the only thing that can keep the peace and stop the war. Freedom of expression is a thing beyond price. Please don’t underestimate it exchanging for silence in the campus.”
You can find Elena Kostyuchenko’s full keynote address here.
In light of the ongoing student protests at Columbia University and on other campuses in the US and worldwide, we turn to the relevant principles of international human rights law on the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of expression. For an overview of how courts around the world have adjudicated on the matter, we invite you to revisit our Special Collection Paper, which surveyed 178 of the leading and most recent judgements and decisions concerning peaceful protests.
The cases we feature today are rulings on the freedom of association and assembly. In Tuskia v. Georgia, the Fifth Chamber of the ECtHR held that Georgia did not violate the petitioners’ right to freedom of assembly by dispersing the protest held at Tbilisi State University on 3 July 2006 and imposing subsequent fines on demonstrators. In a case concerning demonstrators apprehended for lying down in the middle of a road on one side of the highway, the UK Supreme Court confirmed the District Court’s decision that the arrest and prosecution infringed the protesters' rights to free speech and assembly. In the Case of the “Klimacamp 2017,” the Federal Administrative Court of Germany decided that a protest camp and its infrastructural facilities are subject to the protection of the right to freedom of assembly.
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Aryeh Neier, President Emeritus of the Open Society Foundations, and Elena Kostyuchenko, journalist, activist, and author of I Love Russia: Reporting from a Lost Country, delivered keynote addresses on April 25, 2024.
Photo credit: Juan Manuel Ospina Sánchez/CGFoE
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European Court of Human Rights
Tuskia v. Georgia
Decision Date: October 11, 2018
The Fifth Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights held that Georgia did not violate the petitioners’ right to freedom of assembly under Article 11 of the European Convention of Human Rights, read in conjunction with the right to freedom of expression under Article 10, by dispersing the protest held at Tbilisi State University on 3 July 2006 and imposing subsequent fines on demonstrators. The petitioners were a group of professors at the university who were opposed to several university reforms implemented by the rector, Mr G.Kh, and organized several protests in 2006. On 3 July 2006, the petitioners staged a massive protest at the university and entered the office of the rector in an attempt to remove him from office. The police negotiated for two hours with the petitioners to disperse the protest in the rector's office, who agreed to leave without disturbance. Following administrative proceedings, the petitioners were fined approximately 45 Euros for the administrative offenses of resisting arrest and disturbing the public order. The petitioners claimed that the dispersal of their protest and the fines imposed by the state of Georgia violated their rights to freedom of expression and assembly. The state, for its part, argued that these rights were not unlimited and that the petitioners had committed administrative offenses by disrupting the normal functioning of the university and by refusing to vacate the rector’s office for two hours. The ECtHR found that Georgia had interfered with the petitioners’ right to assembly by dispersing the protest and fining them. However, it also found that such a restriction was lawful and pursued the legitimate aim of maintaining public order and the normal functioning of the university. The ECtHR held that the measures were necessary in a democratic society in order to preserve the functioning of the university and noted that the state had not used force and had been tolerant of various protests carried out by the petitioners, even allowing them to protest inside the university after they had left the rector’s office.
United Kingdom
Director of Public Prosecutions v. Ziegler and others
Decision Date: June 25, 2021
The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom confirmed the District Court’s decision that the arrest and prosecution of a group of protesters infringed their rights to free speech and assembly under Article 10 and 11 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case concerned a group of demonstrators apprehended for lying down in the middle of a road on one side of the highway, blocking traffic towards an arms fair venue. The District Judge found that the protestors were not guilty of a criminal offence since their rights to free speech and assembly gave them a lawful excuse to protest. However, the prosecution appealed on a point of law, and the Divisional Court reversed the acquittals. The Supreme Court concluded that the prosecution failed to prove that the defendant’s use of the highway was unreasonable, and therefore it overturned the Divisional Court decision, and the convictions were revoked.
Germany
The Case of the "Klimacamp 2017"
Decision Date: May 24, 2022
The Federal Administrative Court of Germany decided that a protest camp and its infrastructural facilities both are subject to the protection of the right of freedom of assembly. In 2017, the claimants registered a protest camp (“climate camp”) as a public open-air assembly but were denied access to an additional plot to be used as an overnight accommodation area with tents and sanitary facilities. The Federal Administrative Court first found that the character of the “climate camp” as a continuous protest camp does not preclude its classification as an assembly protected by the Assembly Act and Art. 8 German Basic Law. Second, the Federal Administrative Court established that infrastructural facilities of a protest camp are subject to the direct protection of the right to freedom of assembly if they either have a substantive connection to the intended expression of opinion of the assembly or are logistically necessary for the concrete assembly (here: the protest camp) and have a direct spatial connection to it. In this case, the “climate camp” could not have been held without the infrastructure facilities on the additional plot, which was located in spatial proximity to the assembly areas. For these reasons, the Court concluded that both the “climate camp” and its infrastructural facilities are subject to the protection of the Assembly Act and the right of freedom of assembly.
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COMMUNITY HIGHLIGHTS & RECENT NEWS
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● 2024 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize Goes to Palestinian Journalists Covering Gaza. The laureates of the 2024 UNESCO/Guillermo Cano World Press Freedom Prize are Palestinian journalists reporting from Gaza. Awarded annually since 1997, this UNESCO Prize recognizes outstanding work that contributes to press freedom, especially in the context of extreme danger. The Prize name honors Colombian journalist Guillermo Cano Isaza, who was assassinated in Bogotá in 1986. “In these times of darkness and hopelessness, we wish to share a strong message of solidarity and recognition to those Palestinian journalists who are covering this crisis in such dramatic circumstances,” said Mauricio Weibel, Chair of the International Jury of Media Professionals, who recommended Palestinian journalists as the Prize awardees. “As humanity, we have a huge debt to their courage and commitment to freedom of expression.”
● Joint Declaration on Freedom of Expression and Climate Crisis. On May 3, World Press Freedom Day, the special rapporteurs/representatives tasked with the promotion and protection of freedom of expression at the UN, OSCE, OAS, and ACHPR released their Joint Declaration focusing on the freedom of expression in the climate crisis context. The Centre for Law and Democracy helped draft the Declaration, which underscored the significant role that free speech plays in dealing with the global environmental crisis - “a key challenge of our time.” The Declaration includes five parts that comment on access to information about climate matters, enabling conditions for public participation, support of environmental journalism, and protection of marginalized groups. Emphasizing access to justice in Point 4, the Declaration stresses that “[i]nternational law requires States to provide adequate and effective legal remedies to everyone whose rights are breached, including journalists, and environmental and other human rights defenders who face threats or violence due to their work.”
● MENA: Governments Must Protect Press Freedom. In another World Press Freedom Day feature, ARTICLE 19 published a statement on the growing threats to press freedom in the Middle East and North Africa, calling on the state authorities in the region to fulfill their international obligations and uphold freedom of expression. ARTICLE 19 lists censorship, repressive legislation, and attacks on journalists - in the forms of prosecution, imprisonment, and even murder - and highlights the cases of Palestine, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. The press freedom situation is particularly grave in Palestine. Citing the Committee to Protect Journalists, ARTICLE 19 reports that since October 7, 2023, “at least 97 journalists have been killed” in the ongoing conflict of Israel and Palestine, “accounting for three quarters of the total number of journalists killed worldwide in 2023.”
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TEACHING FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION WITHOUT FRONTIERS
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This section of the newsletter features teaching materials focused on global freedom of expression which are newly uploaded on Freedom of Expression Without
Palestinian Digital Rights and the Extraterritorial Impact of the European Union’s Digital Services Act, by Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal. 7amleh, the Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, published a study on Palestinian digital rights and the global impact of EU legislation - the Digital Services Act (DSA) in particular. The study tackles the following questions: How does the DSA’s approach to hate speech and other harmful content affect the digital rights of Palestinians and advocates for Palestinian rights? What are the potential consequences of the DSA’s politicization by the EU in the Israel/Palestine context? What are the advantages and risks of the DSA for Palestinian digital rights? The study explains the DSA, interrogates its relevance for Palestinian digital rights, includes a case study of events that “worryingly point to the DSA having been applied with bias” in the timeframe starting from October 7, and concludes with recommendations addressing the EU institutions, civil society, and online platforms. Download the paper here.
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● Global Perspectives on Press Regulation, Volume 2: Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania, edited by Paul Wragg and András Koltay. The second anthology of this two-volume set, published by Bloomsbury, focuses on press regulation in jurisdictions beyond Europe (which is the focus of Volume 1) - those of Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. Emphasizing that the state of the press varies globally and defies the “traditional divisions between North and South, East and West,” the authors ask: What lies in the core of press freedom? What is successful press regulation? How do we measure its success? And “[w]hat concessions can the state and/or society demand of the press?” The anthology’s editors are Paul Wragg, Media Law Professor at the University of Leeds, UK, and András Kolta, Law Professor at the University of Public Service and the Pázmány Péter Catholic University, Budapest, Hungary. The CGFoE newsletter subscribers get a special discount: order the book online using the code GLR AT5 and get 20% off.
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