Between freedom of expression and the right to honor

PROJECTCOMPLETED (2019-2021)

In today's information society, the media enjoy such a prominent position that they are not only capable of influencing society through a whole class of messages, but they also make it possible for any citizen to address the general public as an active sender in a simple and immediate way. This has contributed to blurring the boundaries between Public discourse and speech in such a way that speakers are often not fully aware of the great repercussion that their words can have when they disseminate them through certain media, such as, for example, social networks. This multiplies the risk of producing texts of public importance that may incur in crimes that violate the right to honor, hate crimes or glorification of terrorism.

Recently,fake news and sensationalist media manipulation have become a major problem. At the same time, the defense of freedom of expression has become a major concern in democratic societies. Thus, in the heat of multiple highly mediatized legal processes related to crimes against the right to honor, hate crimes and glorification of terrorism, the enormous difficulty of trying to delimit the limits of freedom of expression with respect to the right to honor has become evident and has fueled a social discussion around which of these two rights should prevail (cf. Gómez Martín 2017; Tatay Nieto 2018).

In order to determine whether or not a potentially defamatory text has violated the plaintiff's right to honor or whether it has incurred in a hate crime or glorification of terrorism, a linguistic-discursive analysis of the text is essential. This subject of crimes therefore constitutes a area in which linguists could be of great use to society, thanks to the transfer of systematic linguistic criteria that could help to better understand how the boundaries between the right to honor and freedom of expression are materialized in specific linguistic mechanisms. However, linguistic expertise is usually circumscribed to a number of specific preferred areas (disputes about trademark names, in the detection of plagiarism, or else in the identification of the authorship of a given speech through phonetic-prosodic indications of voice recognition or recurrent linguistic features, among others), among which defamation and hate speech are not included (Olsson 2004, Coulthard et al. 2016).

In this project we intend to transfer the theoretical, methodological and descriptive advances in the linguistic research to cases related to the right to honor, hate speech and glorification of terrorism, in order to put them at the service of society. Specifically, the aim is to generate linguistic-discursive criteria that will make it possible to delimit with greater clarity and certainty the limits between freedom of expression and the right to honor in the face of potentially defamatory and/or denigrating texts. These criteria will be of great use to legal professionals, professionals who often produce texts of public importance and, in general, to all citizens in a fully democratic society.