ECHR defamation cases: imprisonment & enforced apologies

In the recently decided case of Mahmudov and Agazade v. Azerbaijan, the European Court of Human Rights reaffirmed that imprisonment is not a permissible sanction in defamation cases. Unfortunately, it also continued to rule it out altogether, stating that imprisonment may be permissible "where other fundamental rights have been seriously impaired, as, for example, in cases of hate speech or incitement to violence" (para. 50). Note that this does not limit imprisonment to situations of hate speech - hate speech is given as one example. While this certainly hints in the right direction, it is still not the kind of unequivocal language one might expect from a human rights court and gives government the opportunity to keep the sanction of imprisonment on the books. Not helpful...

Meanwhile, in Kazakov v. Russia, the Court offers this interesting statement: "to make someone retract his or her own opinion by acknowledging his or her own wrongness is a doubtful form of redress and does not appear to be “necessary”". Given that 'forced' apologies are a common feature of the defamation law in many European countries, this statement may have interesting ramifications for future cases.