By: Jacob Mchangama At this year’s Munich Security Conference, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stressed Europe’s “long tradition in freedom of speech.” Then she drew a redline. “We are very clear with digital sovereignty . . . that what is forbidden offline is forbidden online,” she added. Von der Leyen’s maxim would have […]
By Rym Momtaz, ed. The battle over free speech has taken center stage since U.S. Vice President JD Vance accused Europe of censorship. From travel bans to social media regulation, especially around the Israel-Palestine conflict, are liberal democratic governments weaponizing free speech? [ . . . ] Natalie Alkiviadou Senior Research Fellow, The Future of […]
By Joan Barata [Editor’s note: this is a review of Dr. Natalie Alkiviadou’s new book, Hate Speech and the European Court of Human Rights (Routledge 2025)]. The notion of hate speech has always been a problematic legal artifact in international human rights law. Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) provides a […]
By Katrina Gulliver Last week, I had the great pleasure of welcoming to Atlanta Jacob Mchangama, who came to talk to me about his book. We had a standing-room-only crowd of Freeman readers as I asked him what he thought about the past—and future—of free speech. (The conversation below has been edited for length.) One […]
By Jacob Mchangama In 1977, the Danish film director Jens Jørgen Thorsen was turned away at Heathrow on the orders of Home Secretary Merlyn Rees, after a campaign by the Christian campaigner Mary Whitehouse. Thorsen was carrying the script for a long-planned film about the sex life of Jesus — a project that had already […]
By Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff This essay is adapted from The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2026) European democracies hold free and fair elections, ensure peaceful transfers of power, and maintain a vibrant media landscape. Their independent judiciaries hold governments accountable if they […]
By Peggy Sastre There is censorship that is obvious: it hits, locks up, banned, cuts the Internet, throws journalists in jail and does not bother with big words to make you understand that it prefers silence to freedom. And then there is the sweetest in her manners, cleaner on her, more satisfied with her reasons, […]
Even if it’s the act of a “lone wolf”, as first suggested by US President Donald Trump, Saturday night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner drama certainly did not happen in a vacuum. And just as mass shootings have become commonplace in a United States overrun by firearms, so have attempts on the lives of political figures. […]
By Peggy Sastre Since October 7, 2023, and the terrorist massacre perpetrated by Hamas in Israel, and since the obscene jubilation that has all too often accompanied it, even in the comfort of our own societies, antisemitism has resurfaced in France. It wears that familiar, simultaneously archaic and very contemporary face : brutal, mimetic, and […]
Germany built aggressive systems to combat hate speech, but the line between defending democracy and undermining it may be beginning to blur. Excerpted from The Future of Free Speech: Reversing the Global Decline of Democracy’s Most Essential Freedom by Jacob Mchangama and Jeff Kosseff. Copyright 2026. Published with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press. By Jacob […]