Today, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights is holding a hearing in an important intermediary liability case – Delfi AS v. Estonia (web-stream here). The Court is hoped to correct many issues which the Chamber judgement so flagrantly overlooked, and as a consequence alarmed 69 organizations to support the re-hearing of the case.

In the meantime, some of the NGOs were given a possibility to intervene in the case by submitting their amicus briefs. European Information Society Institute (EISi), an NGO I volunteer for, also submitted one such brief, which is authored by me. In this submission, we make couple of suggestions to the Court, which I would like to share with the readers. EISi suggests that the Court should:

• spells out, as an abstract principle, that any general monitoring obligation imposed upon disseminators of non-editorial third party defamatory content is incompatible with Article 10 of the Convention and
• promote the guarantee of a content author’s right to reply to any allegations before speech is taken down from on-line circulation, by requiring that no liability can be imposed before this moment.

I invite you to read the brief.