Positive obligations concerning freedom of expression: mere potential or real power?

This chapter examines how the European Court of Human Rights has identified and developed a range of positive State obligations to secure the right to freedom of expression. It first briefly examines the theoretical and normative bases for the positive obligations doctrine and then traces its hesitant development in the case-law of the Court. Next, it shows how the Court has slowly become more comfortable with the doctrine and more confident when applying it to cases involving freedom of expression, culminating in its Dink v. Turkey judgment. The driving argument of the chapter is that the positive obligations doctrine has enormous potential for strengthening the right to freedom of expression and that the Court must now tease out its implications in concrete cases in a very scrupulous way, if the doctrine’s full potential is to be realised.