Free Speech

History

The earliest references to free speech, or freedom of speech, in the Western historical record date from the Golden Age of ancient Greece. Most famously, at his trial for sedition in 399 BCE, the philosopher Socrates responded to an offer of freedom by his judges on condition he no longer spread his ideas and teachings with the words: “I am grateful and I am your friend, but I shall obey the god rather than you.” Socrates was executed for speech deemed to dishonor the gods of Athens and corrupt the minds of its youth. In every country, in every century, people have faced similar fates for crimes related to the exercise of free speech.

While the yearning for free expression appears to be a human universal, formal protections for such expression, as the historian Leonard W. Levy (1960) has noted, “remained nearly unknown to legal or constitutional history and to libertarian thought on either side of the Atlantic before 1776” (p. 5). England's Bill of Rights, passed in 1689, broke new ground by guaranteeing the right of members of parliament to speak during “debates or proceedings in Parliament” without fear of punishment or interrogation “in any court or place out of Parliament.” Yet, it was the inclusion of the First Amendment in America's Bill of Rights a century later that not only established freedom of speech as a constitutional right but declared it a natural, or unalienable, right—that is, a right humans are born with rather than one granted by government. Similarly, after World War II, free speech achieved status internationally as a universal right, or fundamental “human right,” in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The latter was drafted by representatives from several nations, including the United States, Canada, China, and Lebanon, and was ratified by 48 countries in 1948.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states, “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression,” specifically, the “freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.” All nations, regardless of their official stances on the declaration, have had to balance demands for free speech against competing principles, creating a spectrum of positions on the importance of free speech relative to other values. Some societies have firmly embedded support for speech protections within their foundational charters and political culture, with the United States at the furthest extreme. At the opposite end of this spectrum lie societies such as Vietnam and, most radically, North Korea, that argue protection of the community is more important than any individual right. Others, such as Thailand and Dubai, provide only limited legal and societal protections for freedom of speech. In other countries, such as Russia and Indonesia, strong speech protections established in statutory law are either weakly enforced or easily overridden by other laws.

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