We must be free to challenge all limits to freedom of expression and information justified on such grounds as national security, public order, morality and the protection of intellectual property.
Timothy Garton Ash
A personal introduction
If our first draft principle is the basic principle, our final one is a kind of meta-principle. It says we must be free to challenge all limits on free expression. That is a procedural claim. On being more fully informed about the reasons for a restriction, we may end up finding it right. Or we may defy it and take the consequences. So far as possible, there must be a transparent process of arriving at the limits to freedom.
Free Speech Debate is a research project of the Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom at St Antony's College in the University of Oxford. www.freespeechdebate.ox.ac.uk