The Volokh Conspiracy
Mostly law professors | Sometimes contrarian | Often libertarian | Always independent
"Europe Really Is Jailing People for Online Speech," by Prof. Yascha Mounk
From the introduction to his April 24 post, which is much worth reading in its entirety:
Imagine this scenario.
The interior minister of a country that considers itself a democracy reports scores of citizens to the police for making critical statements about her while she is in office. Many of them are given hefty monetary fines or even prison sentences.
In protest, a journalist publishes a satirical meme. It features a real photograph of the interior minister holding a sign that is digitally altered so that, apocryphally, it reads: "I hate freedom of speech."
As if to prove the point, the interior minister reports the journalist to the police. He is duly prosecuted and, after a brief trial, given a seven-month suspended prison sentence.
Would you say that this nation has a problem with free speech?
If you do, then you should be very concerned about what has happened in Europe over the last few years. For, as you may have suspected, this scenario is not fictional; rather, it depicts the true facts of a recent German court case—one that is far less of an outlier than most otherwise well-informed observers recognize….
Mounk goes on to offer many examples and analysis, and closes with:
Yes, some extremists invoke the cause of free speech for their own sinister agenda. And yes, J. D. Vance's stark criticisms of European restrictions on free speech reeked of hypocrisy in light of the Trump administration's own attempts to chill the speech of its critics. But the fact that some of the people who point to a problem aren't trustworthy doesn't miraculously mean that the problem isn't real—and anybody who insists on blindly taking the opposite stance of people like Vance on any issue in the world effectively outsources to him the decision of what they themselves believe.
Europe's far-reaching restrictions on free speech have already resulted in many serious miscarriages of justice. They now have a significant "chilling effect" on the ability to engage in robust political speech, which must include the freedom to express unpopular opinions and to satirize—whether in good taste or bad—the most powerful people in society. Far from helping European countries contain the extremists now knocking on the doors of power, that chilling of speech has likely turned them into martyrs and grown their public support.
Europe has a serious free speech problem. Instead of taking ever more measures to punish their citizens for what they say, it's time for countries from Germany to Britain to abolish the deeply illiberal legislation they have, with little attention from the press or the public, introduced over the course of the last decades. To live up to the most basic values of the democracies that are now under threat, the continent needs to reverse course—and restore true freedom of speech.
