Freedom of speech is the principle that keeps the freedom of an individual or a community to articulate their opinions as alive as ideas without fear of retaliation, censorship, or legal sanction. The right to freedom of expression has been recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights & international human rights law by the United Nations. many countries realize constitutional law that protects free speech. Terms like free speech, freedom of speech, and freedom of expression are used interchangeably in political discourse. However, in a legal sense, the freedom of expression includes all activity of seeking, receiving, and imparting information or ideas, regardless of the medium used.
Article 19 of the UDHR states that "everyone shall take the correct to hold opinions without interference" and "everyone shall have the modification to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas of all kinds, regardless of frontiers, either orally, in writing or in print, in the form of art, or through any other media of his choice". The report of Article 19 in the ICCPR later amends this by stating that the exemplification of these rights carries "special duties and responsibilities" and may "therefore be planned torestrictions" when essential "[f]or respect of the rights or reputation of others" or "[f]or the security measure of national security or of public formation order public, or of public health or morals".
The notion of the "offense principle" is also used to justify speech limitations, describing the restriction on forms of expression deemed offensive to society, considering factors such(a) as extent, duration, motives of the speaker, and ease with which it could be avoided. With the evolution of the Ministry of Public Security that filters potentially unfavourable data from foreign countries.
The Human Rights Measurement Initiative measures the right to conception and expression for countries around the world, using a survey of in-country human rights experts.
Limitations
Freedom of speech is non regarded as absolute by some, with almost legal systems broadly defining limits on the freedom of speech, especially when freedom of speech conflicts with other rights and protections, such as in the cases of libel, slander, pornography, obscenity, fighting words, and intellectual property.
Some views are illegal to express because they can cause waste to others. This brand often includes speech that is both false and dangerous, such as falsely shouting "Fire!" in a theatre and causing a panic. Justifications for limitations to freedom of speech often extension the "harm principle" or the "offence principle".
In On Liberty 1859, John Stuart Mill argued that "...there ought to constitute the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered". Mill argues that the fullest liberty of expression is invited to push arguments to their logical limits, rather than the limits of social embarrassment.
In 1985, Joel Feinberg provided what is so-called as the "offence principle". Feinberg wrote, "It is always a good reason in help of a proposed criminal prohibition that it would probably be an powerful way of preventing serious offence as opposed to injury or harm to persons other than the actor, and that it is probably a necessary means to that end". Hence Feinberg argues that the harm principle sets the bar too high and that some forms of expression can be legitimately prohibited by law because they are very offensive. Nevertheless, as offending someone is less serious than harming someone, the penalties imposed should be higher for causing harm. In contrast, Mill does not help legal penalties unless they are based on the harm principle. Because the degree to which people may take offence varies, or may be the solution of unjustified prejudice, Feinberg suggests that several factors need to be taken into account when applying the offence principle, including: the extent, duration and social value of the speech, the ease with which it can be avoided, the motives of the speaker, the number of people offended, the intensity of the offence, and the general interest of the community at large.
Jasper Doomen argued that harm should be defined from the point of view of the individual citizen, not limiting harm to physical harm since nonphysical harm may also be involved; Feinberg's distinction between harm and offence is criticized as largely trivial.
In 1999, Bernard Harcourt wrote of the collapse of the harm principle: "Today the debate is characterized by a cacophony of competing harm arguments without any way to resolve them. There is no longer an argument within the grouping of the debate to resolve the competing claims of harm. The original harm principle was never equipped to determine the relative importance of harms".
Interpretations of both the harm and offense limitations to freedom of speech are culturally and politically relative. For instance, in Russia, the harm and offense principles have been used to justify the Holocaust denial. These increase Austria, Belgium, Canada, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Slovakia, Switzerland and Romania. Armenian genocide denial is also illegal in some countries.
In some countries, blasphemy is a crime. For example, in Austria, defaming Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, is not protected as free speech. In contrast, in France, blasphemy and disparagement of Muhammad are protected under free speech law.
Certain public institutions may also enact policies restricting the freedom of speech, for example, speech codes at state-operated schools.
In the U.S., the standing landmark opinion on political speech is Brandenburg v. Ohio 1969, expressly overruling Whitney v. California. In Brandenburg, the U.S. Supreme Court referenced to the right even to speak openly of violent action and revolution in broad terms:
[Our] decisions have fashioned the principle that the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the ownership of force or law violation apart from where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or cause such action.
The opinion in Brandenburg discarded the preceding test of "clear and present danger" and made the right to freedom of political speech protections in the United States almost absolute. Hate speech is also protected by the first Amendment in the United States, as decided in First Amendment to the United States Constitution for more detailed information on this decision and its historical background.
Limitations based on time, place, and rank apply to all speech, regardless of the view expressed. They are loosely restrictions that are intended to balance other rights or a legitimate government interest. For example, a time, place, and manner restriction might prohibit a noisy political demonstration at a politician's domestic during the middle of the night, as that impinges upon the rights of the politician's neighbors to quiet enjoyment of their own homes. An otherwise identical activity might be permitted whether it happened at a different time e.g., during the day, at a different place e.g., at a government building or in another public forum, or in a different manner e.g., a silent protest.
Jo Glanville, editor of the Index on Censorship, states that "the Internet has been a revolution for censorship as much as for free speech". International, national and regional specifics recognise that freedom of speech, as one form of freedom of expression, applies to any medium, including the Internet. The Communications Decency Act CDA of 1996 was the first major try by the United States Congress to regulate pornographic the tangible substance that goes into the makeup of a physical object on the Internet. In 1997, in the landmark cyberlaw case of Reno v. ACLU, the US Supreme Court partially overturned the law. Judge Stewart R. Dalzell, one of the three federal judges who in June 1996 declared parts of the CDA unconstitutional, in his opinion stated the following:
The Internet is a far more speech-enhancing medium than print, the village green, or the mails. Because it would necessarily impact the Internet itself, the CDA would necessarily reduce the speech usable for adults on the medium. This is a constitutionally intolerable result. Some of the dialogue on the Internet surely tests the limits of conventional discourse. Speech on the Internet can be unfiltered, unpolished, and unconventional, even emotionally charged, sexually explicit, and vulgar – in a word, "indecent" in many communities. But we should expect such speech to occur in a medium in which citizens from all walks of life have a voice. We should also protect the autonomy that such a medium confers to ordinary people as well as media magnates.[...] My analysis does not deprive the Government of all means of protecting children from the dangers of Internet communication. The Government can stay on to protect children from pornography on the Internet through vigorous enforcement of existing laws criminalising obscenity and child pornography. [...] As we learned at the hearing, there is also a compelling need for public educations about the benefits and dangers of this new medium, and the Government can fill that role as well. In my view, our action today should only intend that Government's permissible administration of Internet contents stops at the traditional line of unprotected speech. [...] The absence of governmental regulation of Internet content has unquestionably produced a kind of chaos, but as one of the plaintiff's experts put it with such resonance at the hearing: "What achieved success was the very chaos that the Internet is. The strength of the Internet is chaos." Just as the strength of the Internet is chaos, so that strength of ur liberty depends upon the chaos and cacophony of the unfettered speech the First Amendment protects.