LSE Law students defend freedom of expression at European Court of Human Rights

LSE Law students recently submitted a third-party intervention before the European Court of Human Rights, arguing that national security concerns must be carefully balanced with freedom of expression considerations when states block websites on the basis of sanctions.

The intervention in the case of Boyarov v Ukraine offers guidance on how to set the boundaries for the powers of the states of the Council of Europe to use national security concerns, such as foreign propaganda and privacy concerns, to block access to groups of digital services on their territory. The brief was prepared by five LLM students (LSE ‘24) — Marianne Bellavance, Siddharth Aiyanna Nadikerianda Belliappa, Beth Doherty, Aown Shahzad, Idil Zoraloglu — as a part of the ECtHR Intervention Clinic supervised by Dr Husovec, Associate Professor at LSE Law School. The brief argues that the Court should recognize that the right to access the open and unrestricted internet forms part of the right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the ECHR. Generic bans of user-generated content websites, such as social media, webmail, and messaging services, disproportionately interfere with individuals’ Article 10 rights, due to their indiscriminate nature and inability to engage with a balancing exercise regarding the specific content on, and users of, those websites. It is argued that even the state of emergency, including a formal derogation from Article 10, cannot justify that no independent review of such blocking is ever conducted either before or after the ban is imposed.“We can see that national security rhetoric is increasingly used to censor the access of people to the internet around the world. The European Court of Human Rights now has a chance to set sensible boundaries for when national security argument is being abused.”, said Dr Husovec, summarizing the brief.The ECtHR Intervention Clinic is an extra-curricular activity run by Dr Husovec in collaboration with an NGO, the European Information Society Institute (EISi), that regularly intervenes before ECtHR in important cases involving digital liberties. It provides a unique opportunity for LSE LLM students to get involved in pending cases and suggest to the Court how to interpret the law before it makes its decision. The third-party interventions are often cited by the Strasbourg court in its decisions.

The full brief is available here.