Hacker News Reader

Comment by DoubleGlazing | Hacker News Reader

Article 10 is a bit weak as fundamental rights go.

Part 1 implies that you can say what you want. Part 2 then cancels that out with the proviso that national law can override your part 1 rights.

That's not so much a right, more of a "defined allowance".

View on HN

There are restrictions on the First Amendment too (e.g. obscenity). And Part 2 doesn't mean that any arbitrary national law can override your part 1 rights. You can see a list of Article 10 cases relating to the UK here:

https://inforrm.org/2013/05/10/the-united-kingdom-in-strasbo...

The restrictions aren’t built into the text of the First Amendment. I think that makes a difference in how the courts rule on 1A cases.

I'm not sure it makes that much of a difference. The First Amendment is very vague, and there's a long precedent for many of the same exceptions applying to it. For example, the First Amendment also has national security exemptions (https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1134/national-s...).

There are stronger legal protections for freedom of speech in the US than in the UK, particularly in relation to libel, but the difference can sometimes be exaggerated.

The 1A is not "very vague". The link you post to support your argument says this in its very first sentence:

> Despite the absolute language of the First Amendment

Yes, the government has found cause to argue for various limitations (and outright infringements, as in the case of the Alien and Sedition Acts). But in my comment, I was only asserting that the 1A text is very clear and simple and unlike the British law, does not have a built in caveat. To say it makes no difference is to ignore the significant differences between how U.S. and UK courts have ruled on individual speech rights. UK defamation law, for example, is significantly more in favor of plaintiffs than in the U.S.

I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on vagueness. “Freedom of speech” and “Freedom of the press” could mean a lot of different things, and historically these phrases have never really been interpreted by the US judiciary as conferring absolute rights. We're interested here in which rights are actually conferred by the US constitution as interpreted by the courts, not in which rights someone could potentially read into the document. Nobody is protected by their own personal interpretation of the US constitution.

>To say it makes no difference is to ignore the significant differences between how U.S. and UK courts have ruled on individual speech rights. UK defamation law, for example, is significantly more in favor of plaintiffs than in the U.S.

I didn’t ignore this - I mentioned it in my comment. But I’m not convinced that that has anything much to do with the language of the First Amendment vs Article 11. After all, the First Amendment also does not protect libel - it’s just a difference in how broadly libel is construed in Britain vs. the USA. You won’t find anything in the text of the First Amendment that tells you exactly where libel stops and First Amendment rights start. For that you have to look to prior court judgments.

Fair enough. You're right that the assertion in 1A can be broad enough as to for all intents and purposes be treated as a vague protection.

There’s also article 11 EU charter of fundamental rights [1] that still applies in GB. Possibly even after Brexit.

[1] https://fra.europa.eu/en/charterpedia/article/11-freedom-exp...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com