(Re-)casting Epistemic Rights as Human Rights: Conceptual Conundrums for the Council of Europe

Abstract

AbstractThe Council of Europe has developed an elaborate system for the protection of human rights across its 46 Member States. Its centrepiece is the European Convention on Human Rights—Europe’s most important human rights treaty. The system offers strong protection for the rights to freedom of expression and participation in public debate. These rights, which concern freedom of expression, information, and communication and the integrity of the processes leading to the creation and dissemination of content and knowledge, have clear epistemic underpinnings. But the Council of Europe has yet to set out a comprehensive, coherent vision of the epistemic dimension to these rights. The Council, and in particular its judicial organ, the European Court of Human Rights, has so far addressed epistemic aspects of human rights in an incidental way. This chapter explores the epistemic values that help shape expressive and participatory rights, enquiring whether a re-conceptualisation of epistemic rights as human rights could strengthen the human rights that they already appear to inform. The Council of Europe has been selected as a case-study for this exploratory analysis due to its well-developed regulatory and policy framework. The framework is sufficiently concrete and coherent to allow reflection on the practical implications of the proposed re-conceptualisation.