Regardless of Frontiers: Global Freedom of Expression in a Troubled World eds. by Lee C. Bollinger & Agnès Callamard (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Regardless of Frontiers: Global Freedom of Expression in a Troubled World eds. by Lee C. Bollinger & Agnès Callamard Richard Ashby Wilson (bio) Lee C. Bollinger & Agnès Callamard eds., Regardless of Frontiers: Global Freedom of Expression in a Troubled World (Columbia University Press 2021), ISBN 9780231196994, 440 pages. In this timely and outstanding volume, Lee Bollinger and Agnès Callamard assemble an all-star cast of scholars and practitioners to examine the most pressing global issues in the protection of freedom of expression. And the challenges are many. Governments, even liberal democratic ones, routinely engage in covert (dis)information campaigns, censorship, surveillance, and unwarranted [End Page 742] intrusions into the privacy of their citizens. Extremist speech, disinformation, and incitement to communal violence are rife on the internet. In this context, what guidance exists in current law and policy to bolster freedom of expression? Agnès Callamard's answer in the Introduction is the international human rights system that has developed over the past seventy years and the global norms of freedom of expression that it contains and promotes. These norms are grounded in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Articles 19 and 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), UN General Comment no. 34, and the decisions of regional human rights bodies such as the Inter-American Court and Commission of Human Rights, the European Court of Human Rights, and the African Court and Commission on Human and People's Rights. Emerging from these UN conventions and regional court rulings are a set of coherent legal and social norms that provide guidance on how to address the global challenges to freedom of expression. Callamard and other contributors rely on Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink's theory of the "justice cascade" to explain how human rights norms are generated, adopted, and internalized. This theory is largely vindicated in accounts of the international convergence on key free speech norms such as the right to information, the protection of journalist's sources, and the repeal of criminal defamation laws that protect public figures. Other global norms, such as the regulation of hate speech and disinformation, are a little more problematic. Since there are twenty-two contributions in total, space only permits the review of a selection of chapters. Part I contains five chapters assessing the conditions under which a global freedom of expression norm might exist. Nani Jansen Reventlow and Jonathan McCully's chapter examines the protection of political expression necessary for democratic deliberation. They break the protection of political expression down into four separate global norms of political speech and identify an emerging consensus on some, but not others. International law prioritizes political expression above other free speech rights and robustly defends the speech of elected representatives, especially when it occurs on the floor of a deliberative body. It largely defends the media's right to access the legislature to report on legislative activities, although there is international variance on this question. However, there is only a weakly emergent norm in international law and national courts that opposes defamation and sedition laws that shield politicians from public criticism.1 Part II is comprised of five chapters that review the generation of new global norms by international institutions such as the United Nations (UN) and the African, European, and Inter-American human rights systems. Tarlach McGonagle and Emmanuel Vargas Penagos chart the norm entrepreneurship of the UN on the protection and promotion of freedom of expression. The commitment of the UN to freedom of expression was apparent in the earliest phases of its institutional life, given that one of the first resolutions of the UN General Assembly described freedom of information as the "touchstone" of all other human rights.2 Articles 19 and 20 of the ICCPR consolidated and expanded the foundations laid in Article [End Page 743] 19 of the UDHR which remains "the best-known free expression instrument in any international instrument."3 Important as they are, the articles on freedom of expression articulated in the UDHR and ICCPR formulated the right generically and at a high level of abstraction. The right requires greater specification, and this has occurred in...