My Lords, it is a great privilege to speak after the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead. I have the impression—perhaps I am making it more explicit than he was willing to—that the Government have slightly misconceived the issue: it is not a definition of freedom of speech but rather a definition of the legal framework within which freedom of speech is to be understood. That is, the meaning of the words “within the law” is at issue slightly more than that of the words “freedom of speech”.
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I am of course subject to correction by the noble and learned Lord because the amendments are in his name but, as I see it, Amendments 1 and 10 offer a reasonably clear choice as to the legal framework within which freedom of speech is to be understood. The first, Amendment 1, roots it firmly in Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
As an historical aside, in reference to the remark by the noble and learned Lord when he drew the contrast between freedom of expression and freedom of speech, when reading Article 10 one carries away the impression that it was drafted by people whose first thought was to preserve a free press. Given the history of much of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries—when we already had a free press by the beginning of the 19th century, the use of press censorship was the principal means of political control in many European countries—one can understand why the freedom of the press was so vital to those who drafted the European convention, whereas freedom of speech, perhaps a broader concept, encompasses more than simply freedom of the press.
The idea that one would go around regulating what people said in university lectures or on street corners is probably one that even the most oppressive of Prussian policemen would not have considered reasonable in the early 19th century. Here we are nowadays with a different approach to the regulation of speech, perhaps an even more restrictive one than the Prussian policemen had, so we have to tackle this issue in a slightly different way.