Part VII Rights, Ch.42 Freedom of Expression

Constitutional courts have frequently emphasized that freedom of expression is essential in a liberal democracy. In one of its earliest rulings on the guarantee of the freedom in the post-war German Basic Law, the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe said:1 To a free democratic constitutional order [freedom of expression] is absolutely basic, for it alone makes possible the continuing intellectual controversy, the contest of opinions that forms the lifeblood of such an order … [i]t is the basis of all freedom whatever, ‘the matrix, the indispensable condition of...