hi everyone i'm not sure if all of you know me but my name is holly johnson and i manage the global freedom of expression database and i am very happy to be here this afternoon or almost this afternoon with some old friends and colleagues and the reason we thought we would do this particular panels it's been two years since our last conference as professor ballinger had noted and we've done this now four times over the last five years and we see it as a really important time for all of us to come together on a yearly basis to kind of review what's been going on in the world over the last year discuss the trends the interjurisdictional issues and find new ways to collaborate and since we haven't had time in the last two years to kind of get together we thought we'd take some time now to hear from some of the active members in our community to talk about what they've been working on and the world has changed a lot in that time again as i'm bollinger has noticed or we are now in an age of trump and strongmen all over the world are putting new challenges to freedom of expression liberties so i think what we'd like to do then is you know use this as a rallying point to to get all practitioners and academics together and to find a way of strengthening and continuing to build this community what i'll do briefly is into you know give everybody a little introduction and then we'll kind of move down and hear about what they're all working on and those of you in the audience who happen to be collaborating with them or are working on related issues topics i encourage you to you know pipe up and let us know what you're doing so that we can kind of use this as a platform for further discussions during the next two days and i think what i'll do is i'll start with the way it is listed on the screen we'll start with q so q is the john marshall first amendment chair professor at the university of oregon school of journalism and communication yuma's a prolific contributor to scholarly debate on freedom of expression issues and is very widely published his law journals on freedom of expression have been cited by u s and foreign courts including the house  in great britain the high court of australia the supreme court of canada and the supreme court of the philippines next we'll move on to the infamous munroe price who hardly needs an introduction but i will list a few of his many  titles munroe is the director of the center for global communication studies at the annenberg school for communication at the university of pennsylvania and the joseph and sadie dance like a professor of law and the director of the howard em squadron program for communication policy research in london as well as a chair for the center for media communication studies and the central european university of budapest i don't know how you do it but it is  astounding then we'll move on to karen deutsche carla kerr and karen is currently the director of free expression programs at penn and the american center and she served from two thousand and one to two thousand and fifteen as the project director for freedom house's freedom of the press project an annual report that tracks trends in global media freedoms and then we'll move on to george and george is the executive director of the media law resource center and he was most recently counsel to the law firm of jenner and block he is a former assistant general counsel of the new york times company where he was at the forefront of numerous high profile cases for the company and its affiliated businesses he is also the william j brennan visiting professor to columbia journalism school and he also teaches at new york university and cuny's graduate school of journalism then we will move on to our own jonathan mcauley who we share with m ldi jonathan is a senior legal officer at the media legal defense initiative and has been involved in cases before the european court of human rights the african commission on human and people's rights the eco wast community court of justice and un working group on arbitrary detention he has also worked on cases before the domestic courts in uganda singapore in tanzania and he's also done quite a lot of legal training of lawyers around the world he is our editor extraordinaire for the database and also keeps us abreast of all the important cases coming down the line and then we will move on to sofia and sofia is a legal officer with us and she is originally from colombia the country but she also did get her llm here last year and she has formerly worked for a catalina by tara marino when she was the special rapporteur on freedom of expression and has done quite a bit of work for oas and we are thrilled to have her as our latin america expert so that's pretty much the lineup and now we'll give everybody a few minutes to talk about what they've been doing the last two years here would you like to to start more at the same time sometimes assistants who go beyond the reasonable amount of freedom of expression i am talking about freedom to speak against the administration and going the right for the new leighton speak about what the administrators thing should be very relevant to the university of community i am talking about president mic hecklers veto situations some students simply to over the podium and they prevented him from speaking about the union of the uni concept of a freedom of speech and expression outside the united states the second question is how have you experienced the freedom of speech and expression during your time in the united states  experience even though the us is supposed to be open to whatever they think we should speak out but there is not a reality and the many american students and the faculty members who are not aware of the kind of does anybody have any particular questions for for queue right now okay should we move on and then do some questions at the end okay wonderful and so next on the agenda is monroe high anyway as i understand it were talking about specific areas that we're working on with our universities and i think i've been specifically asked to say a few words about the moot court  the organizing my thinking about this i could say how can we do something that's global and how can we encourage young talent be interested in issues of free expression and do so in a very rigorous way so the most important thing is that this has been a collaborative effort that has involved many of the people in this room and many people who would be in this room if they if they could be would be i can andrey rich it's led from this year forward by cato reagan who is was on the constitutional court of south africa and has recently moved to oxford to take over this institute it was run for the previous ten years and still involved is nicole's grandma who's at the university of johannesburg and as well as that at oxford the the mana vera institute considers that it's there to integrate human rights  research in practice within oxford's law faculty and university more broadly and the new court works with the institute to establish a vibrant community at oxford engaged in pressing contemporary human rights issues around the world so i think of the mooc as a global effort to encourage the vigorous debate among law students on freedom of expression issues i would say there are over one hundred law schools around the world th engaged in it there are regional competitions in south asia china and east asia africa the balkans the americas in the middle east this was a year was the first year of an african round sponsored in part by google  i'd say there are two elements of and nicole strom lost leadership i'd want to emphasize one witch and all these i'd rather make try to discuss some of the problems to make it a little more non descriptive one is how to make the moot as inclusive as possible this year there were two teams from iran at the finals in oxford there there were eight universities in afghanistan that participated in the competition there bangladesh lebanon kenya egypt this year there was the first year of a team from russia all of these present really interesting issues their language issues for example how do you have a global competition on something like a moot court do you try to have it in many languages or do you establish the universal sort of temporary universalism of english we've opted for the la r although it poses great problems and it's very interesting to see whether it's it's teams with a where english is the basic language prevail india  extremely well in the competition singapore etc et cetera how how to attract and maintain teams from turkey from russia from as i say iran yeah there are these issues or language issues there political issues how do you do it in a way that doesn't harm the students how do you engage the institutions china for example i feel proud of the fact that the blue court has a regional competition on freedom of expression kinds of issues with it with renmin university and in china so that is i think a very nice thing the second aspect is what we call making sure the meat is more than a mood i was just ma the the notion of partnerships that lead to training of judges in various places how can the moon be used as a way of encouraging training of judges how does  deepen media studies in the universities involved she's my year owners here chinmayi was the organizer of the first regional moot court competition in india and out of that effort came at the center for communications governance which chinmayi has has headed in recent years it's a really important example of how engagement with the mood and etc can lead to intense more intensive legal education on media issues or in various places and of course it's a pleasure to work with our fearless leader agnes kalamarez participated in spoken at some of our mooc called competitions the iran team in oxford asked us to help set up a system of distant coaches of databases of other things and it'll be really interesting to see whether we can actually do something that implements efforts with people in iran without a lot of funding and support any rate there's a lot to be done in the future i mentioned trying to get teams from turkey and wonderful about it is as i say the collaboration the the effort always almost always totally voluntary by so many in this room and outside and efforts that we i think we all share in terms of building a kind of global community around these issues i have a copy of our latest right now so thanks a lot and before we move on i just wanted to you know share a couple of my experiences from the moot court i had the honor of attending and observing a couple of years ago and i was amazed by the talented people the young students they're a lot of energy and a lot of passion and we are huge not only a huge fan but also a benefactor of the moot court because many of our best and bright young legal researcher beneficiary benefactors benefactors yes sorry yeah we're working on that that's the next phase so they've come from this alumni program and i got an email about two weeks ago from one of our researchers who just got back from the moot court i just want to read to you what he said he said i have exciting news for you my team reached the semifinals at oxford university last week and we finished third out of the forty three teams that made it to the world rounds i also want a citation for being one of the top ten or elicits the moot i cherished every moment at oxford and the mood has in fact cemented my decision to continue working in the field of media law perhaps q can make a few comments about that experience and what that's meant for you because there's always opportunities for many of you to go and take part in this as a judge i participated  let me just say i've judged the moot court competition here in new york a number of years and a few years ago i judged the finals along with on my panel the actual chief judge of the southern district of new york and as we were preparing for the  l argument she confided in me that she thought the facts in the case were more complicated than in any real fit case she's ever had and i certainly concur with that but more importantly monro i heard you say there might be a caribbean  section competition and if it's saint bartholomew's in january i'm in i just want you to know that values of freedom of the press and freedom of expression we're a non profit membership organization we count as members over one hundred and twenty five media companies from abc to vice fox and yahoo at the end of the alphabet  but basically all the just about all the major newspaper magazine book publishing companies and broadcasters and we're getting a lot of the tech companies as well albeit facebook doesn't consider itself a content company  eighteen substantive committees that are aimed at building a community of media lawyers who can work for reforms in media law globally so these vehicles facilitate conversations on sustance issues to better share first amendment values with colleagues across the world and also let us lawyers learn better what the problems and issues are elsewhere so as a few examples of what we do three years ago four years ago now we started a european media law conference in paris it really followed the charlie hebdo disaster by some five months and our first meeting in paris we actually had armed guards because the keynote session was not surprisingly on on hate speech but the purpose of the european media law conference is really both to organize european media lawyers to make them more cohesive and effective and also to some degree to proselytize american lawyers and the european lawyers who were there so how to bridge that divide how to move slightly forward on the european side without being overbearing and you know kind of ugly american was one of the challenges that we had this june we're moving that conference to berlin to get more german lawyers involved and we have will have sessions on hate speech on copyright on right to be forgotten and other other top fake news and other current topics every two years we have a huge conference in london which really has two hundred and fifty or so media lawyers half from the us and half from the rest of the world including obviously the uk and that focus of that conference is really comparative media law to look at all these media law issues from both us and european and rest of the world point of view and compare and contrast last session we had one on hate speech regulation whether that was advisable a panel of lawyers from countries where journalists are commonly in so it's a it's a wonderful conference and it really i think establishes and succeeds in fulfilling our goal of bringing lawyers together getting them to be more cohesive and also to discussing debating and to some extent proselytiz ing for freedom of speech values last conference we have on an international basis is our miami conference which is focused on media on a latin american media law every stand we have that every spring the last two years we've had sessions on reform in cuba after castro copyright and trademark having to do with the rio olympics we had a session just a few months ago on access a nd coverage of the hurricane in puerto rico and on leaks and the panama papers so at the conference to aims to make the latin american bar more cohesive i should point out that there was a discussion  in our meeting last month that mentioned and actually talked in some detail about colombia's free expression case law database and the use that lawyers globally can put to it  i should also point out that traditionally at this conference american lawyers make suggestion to the latin american lawyers about how to deal with their rather authoritarian dictatorial egomaniacal press bashing journalists attacking free speech restricting leaders at this past conference we had last month the latin america lawyers gave restricting president so kind of the cards returned we also file and participate in amicus briefs nationally we actually find that our participation in mekas briefs is far more powerful in the international front than it is at home and so we generally don't get involved as one of the usual suspects in amicus briefs here but we do in important cases internationally for example we sign on to an amicus brief before the court of justice of the eu in google v cnl opposing and outrageously broad reach of a french court order and the right to be forgotten case and also joined the similar brief in a into the supreme court of canada in a similar jurisdiction right to be forgotten case at home what we're doing now beyond our usual  activities is we are joining with other groups including penn including the committee to print journalists and the reporters committee for freedom the press in trying to develop really a social messaging  advertising campaign to try to convince not the extreme right wing but the kind of the middle of the road heartland red state voters of the importance of free speech of the importance of free expression try to push back some on all the blustering coming out of washington we're working on that now and we hope to be on social platform social media platforms and maybe even on television probably after the the midterm elections but that that's an important project that were under taking finally just an example of what we do last week i i happen to be in jamaica on a trip that really was organized by one of jamaica's leading investigative reporters and it was really aimed at embolden jamaican reporters to be more aggressive and also enabling jamaican media lawyers to coordinate more effectively to seek some media law reform i had meetings with the media media bar with students journalists to students with  reporters and editors and the big event was a showing of the miss named movie the post miss named because as far as i know it was at times which first got the pentagon papers vetted them decided to publish them and litigated the case all way before the post did my understanding is that steven spielberg is now working on a movie called watergate and its title will be the times but in any event we had many of these meetings in jamaica really aimed at some media law reform i mean jamaica is pretty much on the english model but you know all these questions their libel laws obviously not as robust as ours and so all these questions were fair game and it was an example of what we do to try to create reform and a better environment for freedom of expression all over the globe it's fascinating i have a few questions for you but i'll save them to the end does anybody in the audience i have a question that they'd like to pose at this point three move on oh okay all right so karen would you like to i think everyone can hear me thank you so much and i'm honored to be here on the panel also adding to the gender diversity in terms of the participants on this particular panel so thank you very much and it's great to be back here among a great group of people again after two years as many of you know penn america is a sort of unique organization and the free expression commune we stand at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect open expression both in the united states and around the world and our free expression programs defend writers and the right to free expression through research and analysis advocacy individual case assistance and then also partnerships with pen centers in in several countries just to reiterate what we've heard from president bollinger already over the past two years we append have seen a huge expansion of the threats to expression and in response to this penn has also expanded its efforts its staff and its resources to combat these threats our free expression team for example has more than doubled in that time if not tripled i would say the only positive of these sort of expansion of threats is that i would say for many of our organizations that do work on these issues we have seen increased interest and and funding from donors as well so that's been i think helpful in trying to combat some of these expanded threats in a number of countries and at home in the united states focus first a little bit and just give some highlights from some of our reports and research which are conducted by several of my colleagues primarily we've when i looked at our website i was sort of astonished to see that over the past two years we've put out ten major research reports what we try to do with our reports an analysis i would say is focus on really cutting edge and emerging issues and the in the realm of free expression the majority of our reports are either on the us or china i would say both countries you know we focus on these two because both have made your a global impact either in terms of setting standards seeing where emerging trends are sort of developing and then also in the case of china's sort of the attempt to frame alternate standards on free expression and alternate modes of restricting expression of course obviously in the us with all the declines of that we've seen since the election of trump we we feel a renewed  impetus and you know priority to focus at home as well as as our work abroad so i'll highlight a little bit just of a the project that we released last weekend actually we launched over the weekend an online field harass or online harassment field manual which is a resource for writers and journalists who are defending against encountering online hate hate speech the field manual was informed by a survey of more than two hundred and thirty writers and journalists and it revealed alarming evidence of a chilling effect in our online communities two thirds of the respondents reported having a severe impact of online harassment that has impacted their lives and their work including fearing for their safety or the safety of their loved ones some of refrain from publishing their work and some have permanently deleted their social media accounts and have just withdrawn from the space altogether the manual is meant however to help writers stay online so what we've tried to do with the manual is is give information about establishing supportive cyber communities engaging encounter speech campaigns enhancing cybersecurity and and also what to do when you have to turn to law enforcement we also offer information to employers of writers or journalists about the best practices for supporting people to stay online in terms of other areas of penn's work we have put out several reports on campus speech and also  principles about how to sort of engage with campus speech issues and a white paper on attempts to legislate at the state level on campus speech laws in several states we've also held convenings at four campuses around the  country which basically bring together students professors and administrators to discuss some of these very thorny free speech issues and what happens when free speech rights are conflicting with other rights and issues on campus so that is sort of a major new area of our work that we have we have one or two staff people working on on those projects we've also put out a major report on fake news and also looking at sort of looking at the problem looking at the various aspects and also providing suggestions for how to to tackle fake news so again although a lot of the focus of these reports has been on the u s they they are they have global applicability most of these issues are present to varying extents in a number of countries around the world  in terms of our reports on china we've we've done several over the last few years we won the most recent focused on government attempts to regulate social media we also did a report on constraints on foreign journalists in china and how that helps to constrain the for information ecosystem and the news getting out of china to the rest of the world and then we also did a report on the disappeared booksellers in hong kong and the issues that that raised regarding sort of rule of law issues and some some of the highlights of our reporting and analysis over the last last couple of years and all of them are available on our web site at penn dot org we've also launched in the last year and a half a new project called the artists at risk connection which really focuses an artistic expression and freedom we're trying to build a network of organizations working on artistic expression and rights and expanding the connections between the organizations that work in this space to better serve individual artists at risk in terms of individual case assistance and advocacy which is the site one of the sections of penn's work that i had our purpose here is really to help raise the voices of prominent writers creative art and journalists on behalf of colleagues who are either facing imprisonment legal cases or other restrictions on their expression around the world i'll highlight first one of our advocacy cases and campaigns over the last year  oleg sentsov who was an injustice a imprison film director and writer who's imprisoned in russia he's a writer for a filmmaker from ukraine we gave him a what pens made you reward the freedom to write award just about a year ago and since then have been mounting a vigorous campaign on his behalf my colleague polina who's here who had our asian programs has been really pushing quite heavily on that case and and bringing bringing that to i'm an international spotlight it's particularly important in terms of this case being a very blatant violation of human rights related to the infringement of the territorial integrity of ukraine within its internationally recognized borders and the case itself contains a number of blatant violations of human rights in the rule of law including torture false testimony and a number of issues so pauline has really been doing a lot of work on that case which is we're hope you know we're hoping he will get out you get out of jail soon but he did he did have a twenty year prison sentence in terms of some of the other work i've been working particularly on our advocacy and our center development work with myanmar we have a number of projects and work right now basically working to build support for freedom of expression rights and principles among new members of parliament and myanmar and among local communities we're working a lot on legal reform issues particularly on digital  rights work working with partners next week we are helping to support them to release a scorecard on free expression which is basically a locally led attempt by almost twenty journalists and free expression groups in myanmar to rate the efforts of the new government on free expression and also to support a survey of journalists highlighting some of the main threats to press freedom and free expression in myanmar and then finally i'm doing a lot of work recently on the case of the imprisoned reuters journalists in m so we are i'd say on a run a range of issues and topics we are trying to really push the envelope create new linkages you know get people out of jail and really highlight a lot of the cutting edge free expression issues that we're facing both in the u s and around the world so thank you very much and it's all available on penndot org or to talk to one of us thank you does anyone have any specific questions for karen at this point okay well we'll move on to jonathan from mld i i know they've had a number of wonderful sick says in recent months that we've been able to add to our database but i'll let him give you the details and maybe he gives some highlights of some things that might be coming down the pipeline that we should keep an eye out for  can can you hear me okay yeah it's an honor to be on this very impressive panel i feel like a bit of imposter here i'm from the media legal defense initiative which is a non governmental organization that's based in london and we speech the first is a very simple means and that is to ensure that journalists have a lawyer on the ground who is funded for them who can run a case for them so all cases that we work on will have a lo lawyer who's working on those cases now they're not normally a media lawyer so often they have to work with us in developing their arguments and drafting their briefs but we'll always have that kind of local collaborative element to our cases we also take cases of strategic importance so cases where we want to set a precedent that will promote and protect press freedom either in a certain jurisdiction or regionally or across the globe and i'll talk about one of the more recent judgements we've had in a few minutes we also intervene in cases of strategic importance at international regional and domestic level last year for example we well and finally we trian lawyers in in several jurisdictions around the world we're currently focusing on east west and southern africa and the aim of this training is to skill up lawyers in media law like i said in many countries around the world they don't have media lawyers per se we're quite fortunate in in in london and i guess in new york as well where you can have lawyers who just specialize in that topic so the aim of our training lawyers so we can build a network of lawyers that we can tap into if journalists find themselves in in legal trouble so in terms of the kind of work we've been doing two thousand and seventeen was actually the busiest year we've ever had i think we were working on over eighty cases ourselves directly in fifty two countries around the world and ninety six percent of those cases were taken in countries that were raided partly free or not free in the freedom house press freedom index a significant majority of the work that we're doing is pushing back on challenging our defending journalists against criminal laws that are used to kind of criminalize the work that they're doing so criminal libel sedition false news laws it's it's an old issue it's been an issue that's been around for a very long time these laws are incredibly old but it's not going away so it's important that we keep keep pushing a lot that area like i said most of our cases look at that unfortunately it's an incredibly long process the lawyers in the room will know that in a number of jurisdictions we work in it can take a very long time to actually obtain a judgement and we've been working on some cases for over seven years for example we've had cases our docket for over seven years successfully defended against state imposed closure as well so that's just a an overview of the stats if you like for two thousand and seventeen there's still an incredible amount of work to be doing we don't always win but it's always good to see that some courts are willing to build their press freedom jurisprudence and and listen to the arguments we're trying to make so i wanted to talk briefly about a recent judgment we obtained from the ecowas community court of justice so this is a court a regional court in west africa human rights court it's also an economic court and we took a case there over two years ago on behalf of four journalists as well as the federation of african journalists who were representing basically the body of gambian journalists been placed under a pretty repressive regime they've been subject to imprisonment harassment and some journalists had been tortured under president johnny's regime that recently came to an end in november two thousand and sixteen so we took this case we wanted to challenge the criminal laws that were being imposed on these journalists that's criminal libel sedition  laws we wanted to get a judgment from the court that would call for those laws to either be repealed or amended in line with international law so that was kind of the objective we had in mind we worked with four incredibly brave gambian journalists who were dictatorship and we also worked with the federation of african journalists with japan african body of journalists unions who were kind of taking an actual popularise on behalf of all gambia and journalists to challenge these laws and and the measures that have been taken against journalists in the gambia so we obtained a judgment in february this year it was actually valentine's day it was a nice valentine's day present for us and  like the right to live in your own country freedom from torture and freedom of movement as well it's a good judgment i would encourage you to to read that read that judgment it's also going to be an incredibly important precedent for the region the court basically said that any laws that are criminalizing speech need to be really narrowly defined and if it's protecting if it's protecting an interest like reputation it's it's rarely if  ever justifiable we were also helped in this case by it free speech organizations who intervened also a freedom from torture ngo redress intervened and the un special rapporteur david kaye also currently working on or that we have filed most of our interventions like i said are at the european courts and at the moment we're trying to get the european court to build its jurisprudence around the protections that are afforded to journalists when they're carrying out news gathering activity we have seen in europe and abroad increasingly the use of measures to prevent journalists from accessing certain areas you might have heard the case in in the uk of granville for example where a council meeting they try to exclude journalists from that meeting yeah i'm really there so we're currently intervening trying to build jurisprudence on that and there are a number of cases that i can talk to you if you want to come up to me individually i can tell you  about also we have an intervention that we're working with pan and lrc on in a incredibly important case in canada that's what look following our filing is due next week we're given leave to intervene it's the case concerning vice news and look at the protections that are afforded journalistic sources in canada they may revisit the standards that are applied in such cases and we're going to provide comparative and international law input not case just a small plug rd of may the hearing will be held and it is televised i believe so feel free to tune in on that and the final thing that i wanted to say was just the training in east west and southern africa  those coming up again and if you know any lawyers in those regions i'd encourage you to tell them about it we'd be interested to receive applications from them and usually it leads to concrete follow up we have several cases that are she's been working specifically on an educational tool that we've been developing and she's gonna give you some of the details on it is this working yeah well good afternoon ob just it would be just an announcement i'll try to be very brief at the columbia global freedom of expression we are now designing a web portal to support and to strengthen the teaching and the training of global freedom of expression this idea started a after an meaning that we had in two thousand and fifteen with law professors from all around the world we got together and we discuss with them that they are engaged in delivering courses of global freedom of expression comparative media law and these are the objectives of this meeting was to determine the state of affairs as far as curses and global freedom of expression the adequacy of teaching materials the obstacles and the expression is thought in a number of different law schools from around the world the objective of this new new project of this new initiative that we have is to design this web portal that will provide  a range of teaching and training materials on global freedom of expression and media law so that it can be literally a one stop shop for curriculums guides training materials multimedia resources and so on so that professors who want people who want to teach freedom of expression can have can go to this portal and find out ways to adopt a global perspective on this issue this so obviously this project we seek to promote the teaching of global of a global perspective on freedom of expression as opposed to a national or over a regional approach or to just a comparative  on the seven second half of two thousand and seventeen we began implementing this plan of action and we started consulting with different stakeholders with and we initiated that sign of this online por l we started gathering all the tools and we agreed on a partnership with the national law university in india and with the university of andis in colombia and we're reaching to a state  need to to design the structure of the portal we still finding different ways so that this could be accessible for professors and for teaching teachers thank you thank you sophia are there any questions from the audience toby mendel center for law and democracy at first just a quick comment on the moot and i yeah i spent a little time working with the afghan team and i know when they went to the regional moods they kind of had their socks blown off by all of these incredibly eloquent people from india and pakistan and whatever so language i think is a really difficult issue like if you're not a native english speaker it's really a big disadvantage but i don't have a solution for that either and my question really is for queuing you know that i have been following to some extent this  case and i have to say i was really impressed that the president i mean if i was trying to deliver a state of the university address and the plot he stood it's blocked me i'd you know throw them all in prison or something but i mean i thought you had a really mature and him you know i was impressed with his response which was to foster a debate you know about the issue but i i and i don't know kind of what the physical dynamics of it were cuz i'm kind of struggling a little bit like with that too like how he didn't manage to prevail over them but also  i'm also wondering whether you're not looking at something a little bit more muscular because i mean if i hire him back to my student activist days you know i could mobilize ten or fifteen people to disrupt practically anything and you know i mean it wasn't you know students are radical and they want to do things and if we had been allowed to do that sort of thing in those days you know we would have and i you know you can't have ten or fifteen students stopping discussions on campus especially you know that kind of thing but any other kind of discussions so i mean i wonder you're not worried about you know this thing getting legs and other students think you know we can disrupt things pretty easily and you know whether you have another solution as well campus that's where students are supposed to learn and deal with different ideas of diversity of viewpoints not to be kind of narrowed and and and kind of cornered in believing in what they believe in and not listening to anyone else so to me you know for all the reasons you've just said this issue is almost inexplicable on a campus where there should clearly be the the the greatest of uninhibited robust and wide open debate because well students are forming their views and they ought to be exposed to all sorts the notion of a kind of a sheltered existence from talk they don't like i think is totally inappropriate inhuman you know everyone else since everyone else has been thinking about the same issues really um oh just to introduce myself i'm a litigator from india the supreme court had two variety of civil liberties i li variety of civil liberties issues including free speech and also represent media companies now as people who work on free speech i think we have a visceral reaction to shutting anyone down right but i also increasingly think that as a global society we're becoming more and more aware of the fact that more speech isn't necessarily the solution so if you look you know attention is a zero sum commodity because of time for example right and if you look at facebook is the best be that starts out at a fairly low level it starts out calling people insects right but later then rises to a level of genocide um so i think that this sort of traditional idea that we this sort of oliver wendell holmes the marketplace of idea is something that's exploding now and market failure all over the world not just online in traditional media as well and i do think that you know i just read um karen's i mean penn's guidelines i just came through it and i think it's an interesting start but but it but you know there are ideas for example of platforms does anyone have a right to a platform is the liberal analysis sufficient to address this kind of thing all and dara's hear the word in the united states of america is a marxist analysis of structural power useful in such a situation so that when looking at issues of power we're looking at issues of who speaks who doesn't and we are looking at you know and where and it's not just a so more speech is better and we're going to shut down the students you know and i and i do think that this is actually a good place to to reflect on those sorts of things and so i would love to hear i mean i don't know how much time we have maybe informally  a quick comment just in response to that and to some of the other recent comments first a disclaimer i'm definitely not an expert on this particular sub topic a few of my colleagues really have worked  depth on our campus speech work but just from what i've been able to take from from many of their readouts of some of the sessions we've been holding on campuses what i think what we've found is that where the tensions really come in is where students feel like you know free speech rights are then conflicting and constricting their rights in other ways so their rights as women to speak or their rights as minorities or other so other competing rights and then and then somewhere that comes into conflict with with free speech rights in the convenings we've done on campuses where my colleagues have really found it was the hardest to pull people together to have these discussions it was relatively easier i think at campuses where the main issues involved sort  of controversial speakers and whether they should be able to speak or not that was sort of a i would say a less complicated you know discussion to have but in in cases where there had been for example actual incidents of racial violence and when campus there had been a murder of a black student those were the areas where the campuses where it was really really hard to engage in this very absolutist free speech issue or you know and and so that's what we found was in areas where there had been actual much more serious incidents of you know violence that that was where we had the hardest time sort of convening people to discuss these issues and push sort of a free speech perspective so it is something i think that pen is is continuing to work on and and grapple with i don't think there i mean i can try i think i think you raise very very salient points i do think it's important to distinguish what kind of speech we're talking about because the notion of students stopping speech they don't like positions they disfavor the president of the university because he's a bad guy or whatever i mean that seems indefensible to me on the other hand i mean we've had debates in a number of these conferences as i think i mentioned and i should shout out to david heller who's helped work with me and organizing all these conferences but we've had the bates over the last couple of years about hate speech and when you really are talking about bullying hate speech that's aimed at harming individuals or even small groups of  people i mean that's a crime in most other countries of the world other than ours and i don't think that we have the right or you know intellectually it makes sense to say they're wrong we're right let's just move on i mean i think they're really really difficult issues if you're talking about you know really scarring people with what you say about them if it's aimed to harm them it's not an easy answer but that shouldn't be mixed up with you know basically not letting a justice of the supreme court talk at your campus because you don't like what he has to say those are two very different issues and the last thing i'd simply say is that on the on the other other than narrowly defined hate speech the other thing that's so troubling is is is false news but i think for the most part that's a phenomenon for the most part not wholly of social media and it seems to me it's it's not up to it shouldn't be a matter of government regulation which has lots of its own problems as was discussed earlier but is really up to the the some media companies to monitor their platforms and somehow and some responsible way to deal with it but it's a it's a very hard issue i'd like to ask a question of george's sort of a follow on to this issue if we kind of take these issues and put them into the red states i'm fascinated that you're working with advocacy organizations to open up dialogue there and i'd be curious to know what sort of framing of the freedom of the press arguments they're doing to it reach very ideologically rooted in driven community and what is resonating with them at all as forms of counter speech or other sorts of access well i can't answer that in terms of the group we're working in because we're really just kind of starting but my own view and this is a purely personal view is that if you're going to try if you're really going to try to change people's minds you clearly have to deep politicize it it can't be about trump or against trump because people are so ingrained in their views about trump that that's you're going to turn them off in the first sentence in terms of journalism and the importance of journalism i've talked to a number of editors out there and they all to an amazing amount of conformity say the same thing and that's that you have to emphasize local news because people like their local newspapers they like their local broadcaster the local media has done good things for their community and you have to start from that as the positive basis on which to move on rather than deal with national issues which are so politicized already and there's such division on that you're not going to be able to get much movement are there any other questions from the audience okay well that i'm gonna call on a couple of people i know there are some people in the audience who are working on some very interesting things so i'd like to take a moment to introduce you to them and then maybe have them stand up and just say a few words about what they're working on we are very lucky this semester to have a visiting scholar with us by the name of  who many of you may know he's written quite a lot on free speech issues is jacob here he is now putting together a podcast on the history of freedom of expression is absolutely fascinating and i'm hoping he can just say a few words  about the program and we'll give you the link to it so you will have a chance to listen and spread it on to your students thank you very much holly yes it's a it's a privilege every day to be sitting not in the same office but very close to to the global freedom of expression center so the podcast is a clear and present danger a history of free speech which covers the history of free speech from antiquity to artificial intelligence once i get out of the middle ages the idea is the the idea is is basically that often i find discussions about free speech to be captive to tribalism or very sort of abstract notions or being very legal in nature so i  wanted to try and say you know the historical context why do we why are we and committed to this idea is it even important what uh what are the struggles that have defined free speech throughout the throughout the ages and also sort of to learn from you know what can the trial of philosophers that had very very interesting discussions about greek philosophy that would probably get them killed or imprisoned in certain countries today academic freedom what can we learn from debates between natural the university of paris in the th century where you actually had so an explosion of reason and very interesting discussions and when it comes to false news what you learn from the french revolution were quite a few people lost their heads because the revolutionaries went from praising free speech as as absolute almost suddenly you know killing people that they disagree with i mean even paying compromised that says something about how difficult the free speech is as a concept so it's a fascinating journey like i said i'm only in the middle ages aren't we're releasing an episode next thursday and then no actually tomorrow and then next next time we'll be inquisitions in the middle ages so we have quite some time to go before we we get to all the the the tech issues that we deal with today but even there i think there are there important lessons to learn  for for for our very modern world from from generations that have lived before us so i hope you will you'll take the time to listen at one point excellent thank you and i believe you've actually translated one of them or have done that to actually narrate it and then try to work with an organization called ideas beyond borders to spread it to the middle east and north africa we already have listeners in saudi arabia and kuwait and other places sudan but we  want to try and reach that area even more because i think it's also important to have that non western elements of the history of free speech because they have obviously been very important contributions outside  outside the west very much and i'd now like to call on our latin american colleagues because i think ghee has been doing some amazing work in the last year and edson we could maybe get some updates on what you guys we have enough time yeah we have it we have two minutes it's very two minutes perhaps two need to be very synthetic but what we are doing expanding a program we started five years ago with many of you in with freedom of expression and privacy issues when we are talking with judges in many countries chief justices on on every age of sixty five seventy years old when we are explaining those kind of things they have the same kind of questions  and so we need to even go further in this relationship with the judiciary and explaining to them all this new world but also the general principles of freedom of expression already accepted by our encounter so it's very exciting very interesting developments very concrete results but many more things to do i've mentioned we have trained eight zero judges and prosecutors but only brazil has seventeen zero judges so still lots of people to be involved and of course we are doing this with edison with catalina nine and many others thanks ok i think it's time for lunch unfortunately it's raining today there is a magnificent patio out here and we've set up tables but go out at your own peril or bring your coat or you know umbrella otherwise we will be more or less confined to this room for lunch so you'll have to just make the best of camping out inside today but i think the way they're supposed to prove tomorrow so you've