Internet access as a fundamental human right?

On June 10th, France’s ver­sion of the Supreme Court struck down parts of a new French law known as HADOPI:

France’s high­est court, the Constitutional Council, ruled that access to the inter­net is a “fun­da­men­tal human right” this week in strik­ing down a con­tro­ver­sial “three strikes” anti-​​piracy law.

via Is Internet Access a Fundamental Human Right? France’s High Court Says Yes.

The deci­sion, in para­graph 12, goes back to the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen to say ground its deci­sion in terms of free expres­sion of thoughts and ideas:

La libre com­mu­ni­ca­tion des pen­sées et des opin­ions est un des droits les plus pré­cieux de l’homme : tout citoyen peut donc par­ler, écrire, imprimer libre­ment, sauf à répon­dre de l’abus de cette lib­erté dans les cas déter­minés par la loi. (The free expres­sion of thoughts and of opin­ions is one of the most pre­cious rights of human­ity: all cit­i­zens  can speak, write, freely print, except in cases of abuse as deter­mined by law.)

Nonetheless, the court does not say that restric­tions as in HADOPI are uncon­sti­tu­tional, since they also clearly point out (as the quote above says) that rights of free expres­sion can be lim­ited to pre­vent “abuse” — such as to pre­vent copy­right infringe­ment. However, in American legal terms, I might call this entire sec­tion “dicta,” but the French civil law sys­tem is dif­fer­ent, of course. Despite con­nect­ing inter­net access to the fun­da­men­tal right to free­dom of speech and thought, this was not the basis for the court’s deci­sion, although it cer­tainly informed it.

Instead, sev­eral other, per­haps equally impor­tant con­cepts, are at issue:

1. The French legal sys­tem requires a pre­sump­tion of inno­cence, and the leg­is­la­ture can­not change this. (See para­graph 17 and 18.)

2. The sanc­tion, after three reported inci­dents of infringe­ment, involved cut­ting off Internet access. The court believed, essen­tially, that this was too great a sanc­tion to allow a mere admin­is­tra­tive agency the power to imple­ment it. (This is clearly informed by an idea of Internet access facil­i­tat­ing free com­mu­ni­ca­tion, and thus comes clos­est to mak­ing Internet access part of such a right). (See para­graph 16.)

3. While the leg­is­la­ture can bal­ance the right of pri­vacy and the pro­tec­tion of intel­lec­tual prop­erty, entrust­ing a pri­vate entity with sur­veil­lance pow­ers uncon­sti­tu­tion­ally inter­feres with the right to pri­vacy. (See para­graphs 26 and 27.) As part of this, in para­graph 30, the court also for­bid mon­i­tor­ing or inter­cep­tion of pri­vate com­mu­ni­ca­tions in order to com­bat copy­right infringement.

An inter­est­ing rul­ing that, while it does not quite equate Internet access to other human rights, cer­tainly sug­gests that it might be a com­po­nent in free­dom of expres­sion — cer­tainly I can imag­ine a par­al­lel to destroy­ing a news­pa­pers print­ing press, for exam­ple, as hav­ing a sim­i­lar chill­ing effect on expression.

Related arti­cles

• France, the EU, and Internet Speech (volokh​.com)
• Hadopi : la déci­sion du Conseil Constitutionnel expliquée…
  (fr​.read​writeweb​.com)
• French court sav­ages three-​​strikes law, tosses it out (arstech​nica​.com)
• France Rejects Three Strikes Law … For Now (mash​able​.com)