ECtHR held that the conviction of the applicant for delaying the removal of hateful Facebook comments did not violate the right to free speech

The Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) held that the applicant’s criminal conviction for failing to promptly delete Facebook comments that incited hatred and violence against individuals of the Muslim faith did not violate his right to free speech.

The case applicant was a local councilor standing for the French parliamentarian elections for the Front National Party (FN) in 2011. At that time, the applicant wrote a post on his publicly accessible Facebook wall that was used for the election campaign, under which third parties added comments that incited hatred and violence against individuals of the Muslim faith. A partner of the FN became aware of the hateful comments and lodged a complaint before the public prosecutor, as the applicant did not delete them. The French Criminal Court convicted the third parties as accomplices and the applicant “guilty as principal offender” for failing to promptly delete these comments on a public communication service of his own initiative. The applicant lodged an appeal, where the French Court of Appeal upheld the applicant’s conviction. The applicant appealed the decision, which the Court of Cassation dismissed.

The applicant then filed an application in 2015 before the ECtHR, claiming that his conviction for not deleting the hateful comments breached his right to freedom of expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Following the Chamber of the Court’s decision that there had not been a violation of Article 10 on the freedom of expression, the applicant referred to the Grand Chamber, which gave the final decision that the criminal conviction for failing to promptly delete Facebook comments, that incited hatred and violence against individuals of Muslim faith, did not violate the right to free speech.