Human Rights Court Says Sites Liable for User Comments | Hacker News Reader

Human Rights Court Says Sites Liable for User Comments

techdirt.com

6 pointsprotomyth7 comments

I am a bit surprised that the Human Rights Court is so unenlightened. Between this and the right to supress history, I worry where Europe is headed.

And the U.K quickly descending into a totalitarian state continues.

You know this is Estonia, right? A completely different fucking country?

Its an anti-free-speech decision by the European Court of Human Rights, which has the same authority over Britain as it does over Estonia.

OTOH, its a decision which does not impose new prohibitions on such restrictions by states, rather than imposing free-speech restrictions, so, with regard to its impact on Britain, its kind of hard to see it reasonably be described as imposing totalitarian on the UK so much as signaling that, should Her Majesty's Government choose to impose certain restrictions, the European Court of Human Rights won't be an effective venue to fight them.

Settled by the European Court of Human Rights which sets precedent for all 47 signatories. Case gets denied by your state? Take it up with the ECHR. Since they now have precedent regarding user comments - if a comment hurts your poor little feelings, file a case with the ECHR.

This is like the Supreme Court ruling over a case set in California. It would effect New York all the same, who cares if the case is based in California?

This isn't creating a new cause of action for the offended, its declining to interfere with liability under domestic law. This decision allows liability under domestic law (in the particular case, the challenged law was Estonian), it does not create new liability where it does not exist under the law of the state. Its basically like a decision of the Supreme Court finding that the Constitution does not prohibit a state-law cause of action, rather than one creating a new federal basis for liability. So, no, if you don't like a comment, you can't take it to the ECHR. You just no longer have to worry about the website who you've sued successfully in your local courts taking its offense at having being found liable to the ECHR.

So it has precisely zero effect on Britain beyond not blocking certain types of liability that the British government might create through its own laws.

>You just no longer have to worry about the website who you've sued successfully in your local courts taking its offense at having being found liable to the ECHR. So it has precisely zero effect on Britain beyond not blocking certain types of liability that the British government might create through its own laws.

As explained near the end of the article:

>As a consequence, active intermediaries and blog operators will have considerable incentives to discontinue offering a comments feature, and the fear of liability may lead to additional self-censorship by operators. This is an invitation to self-censorship at its worst.

The statues under the United Kingdom Hate Speech laws means people can sue in courts for comments containing hate speech and the ECHR now has a precedent to rule in their favor and hold the intermediate party liable for said comments. The result? Nobody wants to be held liable, so they shut down their comment sections.

That's bad for free speech and is a side-entry form of censorship. Not direct from the state, but implied and enforced by the state on private entities.

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