Freedom of Expression

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The Twice-Coerced Zambia and the Synergy Between Human Rights Violations and Prohibited Intervention

May 13, 2026

Last week, like many other scholars and activists, I was due to participate in RightsCon, the leading conference on human rights in the digital age. This year it was supposed to take place in Zambia, with thousands of participants. The conference is organised by Access Now. They had for many months directly cooperated with the Zambian government, which had supported the conference and had signed a memorandum of understanding with the organizers. Yet, just days before the conference, and without any consultation with the organizers, Zambian state media announced that the conference would have to be ‘postponed.’ Access Now decided that the conference simply could not take place, even in a fully online format. The reason for the ‘postponement’ was communicated in a letter written in unintelligible bureaucrat-speak. The real reason for the cancellation of the conference was, apparently, pressure on Zambia from China, because various experts and activists from Taiwan were due to speak at the conference. Thus, a conference on digital human rights was effectively cancelled by Zambia, in…

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On Navalny, the Law, Lies, and the Attribution of Murder

March 18, 2026

On 14 February 2026, in a joint statement, the UK, Sweden, France, Germany and The Netherlands publicly accused the Russian Federation of assassinating the opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who died on 16 February 2024 while imprisoned in a penal colony in Siberia. The five states alleged that Navalny was poisoned with epibatidine, a toxin naturally…

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A New Chapter in the Prophet Cartoon Controversy: A Clear Violation of Freedom of Speech in the Making

December 23, 2025

On June 26, satirical magazine Leman published a cartoon, depicting two men with white wings flying over a bombarded city, greeting each other: “As-salamu alaykum (Peace be upon you), I am Muhammad,” “Aleichem sholom (Peace be upon you), I am Moses”. The Istanbul prosecutor's office, claiming that the cartoon depicted Prophet Muhammad and Prophet Moses and…

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Capping Freedom of Expression? Assessing Kneecap’s Controversy under the ECHR

June 13, 2025

On Friday 23rd May, the Irish-language rap trio Kneecap headlined London’s Wide Awake music festival at Brixton’s Broxwell Park. Attended by 20,000 fans, this marked the Belfast group’s first stage performance since the announcement that the Metropolitan police charged one of the group’s members with terrorism offences. Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh (stage name Mo Chara), is…

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State Lies as Violations of Human Rights

June 2, 2025

State officials lie all the time. Authoritarian states are almost by definition systematically deceiving their own populations, attempting (and often succeeding) in devaluing the whole idea of truth. They do so using both traditional media (e.g. state-controlled TV and radio stations) and the tools of the digital age. Lies are the foundation of authoritarian control. Indeed, lies are…

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