Title: Yes, freedom of speech should be absolute - spiked
Headings: Yes, freedom of speech should be absolute
Yes, freedom of speech should be absolute
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Content: Today, the Founding Fathers, and later the likes of John Stuart Mill, whose defence of free speech was, at points, equally as stalwart as his liberal predecessors across the pond, are implicitly assumed to have underestimated the harm in free speech. They were naive; they didn’t know what we know now; namely, that freedom of speech is never absolute, that there must be limits. Just think of the number of people who proclaim their support for free speech before reeling off a list of reasons why its exercise must be limited. In the UK, for instance, the head of civil-liberties group Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, is seemingly more concerned with the problems of free speech than its benefits – hence she once talked of ‘respecting freedom of conscience, thought and religion and free speech within such proportionate limits as are necessary to protect others’. Little wonder she ended up sat on the ‘panel of experts’ at the press-freedom-quashing Leveson Inquiry. Podcast
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Or take an even more prominent example: article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. ‘ Everyone has the right to freedom of expression’, it says, before stating that this freedom ‘may be subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law and are necessary in a democratic society, in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, for the protection of the reputation or rights of others, for preventing the disclosure of information received in confidence, or for maintaining the authority and impartiality of the judiciary’.