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Comment by chopin | Hacker News Reader

That shouldn't fly with ECHR. Oh, wait...

But it's very practical to deal with uncomfortable dissent.

I suspect ou are thinking of the ECJ - which is the supreme court of the EU. The ECHR isn't related to the EU (although I suspect a lot of people don't realise that):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...

Maybe he did think of the ECHR. While it is not strictly part of the EU, being in the EU means you are under ECHR jurisprudence.

Anyway it was the ECJ which shut down similar UK surveillance laws in the past, and I remember getting rid of its "interference" being one of the arguments in favour of the Brexit.

Significantly, though, the UK is not leaving the Council of Europe, so the ECHR will continue to apply. The usual suspect object to the ECHR for the usual suspect reasons, but the fact is that membership of it is a requirement for most forms of security co-operation in Europe. So there's no good case for leaving it.

Doesn't mean we won't one of these days.

The ECHR (European Court of Human Rights) does not believe free speech to be a human right: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/its-not-fr...

The ECHR follows the rules about free speech enshrined in the agreement it exists to uphold, which explicitly leave room for local laws in this area, which meant that in this case it didn't overrule national law. Given the range of members, it's sadly unlikely this will be changed anytime soon (which is why I think it'd be worthwhile to do changes here on a smaller scale, e.g. through EU law)

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