Democracy & Elections

The Lawfare Podcast: The Arrival of International Human Rights Law in Content Moderation

Jen Patja, Evelyn Douek, Quinta Jurecic, David Kaye
Thursday, May 27, 2021, 12:00 PM

Published by The Lawfare Institute
in Cooperation With
Brookings

Way back at the beginning of the Arbiters of Truth podcast series on our online information ecosystem, Evelyn Douek and Quinta Jurecic invited David Kaye to talk about international human rights law (IHRL) and content moderation. David is a clinical professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and when he was first on the show, he was also the United Nations Special Rapporteur on freedom of expression. It’s been a year and a half since then, and in the intervening time, David’s vision of IHRL as a guiding force for content moderation has become mainstream. So Quinta and Evelyn asked him back on to discuss the increasingly important role played by IHRL in content moderation—and what it really means in practice. They also talked about the rise of digital authoritarianism around the world and what international law and leading democracies can do about it.




Jen Patja is the editor and producer of the Lawfare Podcast and Rational Security. She currently serves as the Co-Executive Director of Virginia Civics, a nonprofit organization that empowers the next generation of leaders in Virginia by promoting constitutional literacy, critical thinking, and civic engagement. She is the former Deputy Director of the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution at James Madison's Montpelier and has been a freelance editor for over 20 years.
Evelyn Douek is an Assistant Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Senior Research Fellow at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. She holds a doctorate from Harvard Law School on the topic of private and public regulation of online speech. Prior to attending HLS, Evelyn was an Associate (clerk) to the Honourable Chief Justice Susan Kiefel of the High Court of Australia. She received her LL.B. from UNSW Sydney, where she was Executive Editor of the UNSW Law Journal.
Quinta Jurecic is a fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and a senior editor at Lawfare. She previously served as Lawfare's managing editor and as an editorial writer for the Washington Post.
David Kaye teaches law at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, and served from 2014 to 2020 as the UN Special Rapporteur on freedom of opinion and expression. He is a 2023-2024 Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in International Law at Lund University, Sweden.

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