Strasbourg Observers

Freedom of Expression and the Right to Reputation: Human Rights in Conflict

May 02, 2011

As part of our research project I have written a paper on the conflict between freedom of expression and the right to reputation in the defamation case law of the European Court of Human Rights. The paper, based on an analysis of over 120 judgments and entitled “Freedom of Expression and the Right to Reputation: Human Rights in Conflict”, has now been published in the American University International Law Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, 183-236.

The article is available on the website of the journal. It’s free of charge, so if you are interested, get it while it’s hot! Direct link: here.

Comments on the article, below this post or via e-mail, are more than welcome!

The abstract:

Ever since the European Court of Human Rights has recognised the existence of a right to protection of reputation under the European Convention on Human Rights, a conflict between Convention rights arises in defamation cases. In such situations of conflict between human rights, their indivisibility requires that both rights carry a priori equal weight. Yet, the research conducted for this article indicates that the Court engages in preferential framing and incomplete reasoning when attempting to resolve the conflict between freedom of expression and the right to reputation in its defamation case law. In order to pre-empt such preferential framing and to improve the reasoning of the Court, the article proposes a theoretical model for the resolution of conflicts between human rights. The defamation jurisprudence of the Court is critically analysed through the lens of this model. The article demonstrates how the model might prove to be a useful tool to improve the legal reasoning of the Court in defamation cases.

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