Kristóf Gál, Kinga Kálmán, Boldizsár Szentgáli-Tóth: Freedom of expression under new challenges: expected impact of Covid-19 pandemic to the Article 10. case law of the European Court of Human Rights

11th of March 2020 marks the date for declaring one of the biggest challenges the world has to face during the first decades of the 21st century.  After some relatively peaceful decades despite all crises entailing huge social and economic development, an unprecedented pandemic seems to stir up everything that had been considered as consolidated and reconciled. As it has impacted almost every segment of our daily lives, the Covid-19 pandemic posed various risks and many possible restrictions on human rights as well. The efforts made to protect human lives, public health, and security often outweighed numerous well-elaborated and allegedly inviolable constitutional principles such as freedom of movement or residence,  privacy,  restricted access to healthcare, education, or justice,  and established new obstacles towards the right to work and decent working conditions.  Alongside these practices, existing discriminatory breaches tended to reach deeper levels.  On the one hand, we summarize additional restrictions of anti-disinformation laws on free expression during the first months of 2020 as an extension of a still existing tendency and attitude during the previous years to provide greater weight for competing rights and interests when the limits of free expression are concerned. Secondly, in our view, only the most virulent interferences during the first wave of the pandemic will be declared as violation of Article 10. of the ECHR, but more demanding standards should be followed during the later stages of combating Covid-19.