Freedom of Expression, Public Morals, and Sexually Explicit Speech in the European Court of Human Rights
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Keywords

Article 10
courts
Europe
freedom
morals
obscenity
sex
speech

Abstract

Although the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) has frequently favored supporting freedom of expression, some observers worry that the “public morals” clause of Article 10 may generate Court deference to states’ speech-restrictive rulings. We draw on an ongoing collaborative effort to construct a Global Free Speech Repository of all Article 10 freedom of expression cases, combining a quantitative overview of patterns of outcomes with a close reading of a number of related cases. We find that the public morals clause is associated with deference only to a limited extent. Instead, cases closely related to public morals—those containing what we term “sexually explicit speech”—are far more prone to elicit Court deference to state restrictions. These findings suggest that underlying ideas about the type of speech involved rather than the text of the institutional provisions shape European Court of Human Rights decisions in these cases.

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