Speaking Freely: Agustina Del Campo

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Agustina Del Campo is the Director at the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE) at the University of Palermo in Buenos Aires, Argentina. She holds a law degree from Universidad Catolica Argentina and an LL.M. in International Legal Studies from American University Washington College of Law.

Agustina has extensive experience in human rights training, particularly as it relates to freedom of expression and the press in the Inter-American human rights system. She has taught and lectured in several Latin American countries and the U.S.

EFF’s Executive Director Cindy Cohn caught up with Agustina at RightsCon 2023 in Costa Rica. In this brief but powerful exchange Agustina discusses how, though free speech has a bad rap these days, it is inherent in any advocacy agenda aimed at challenging – and changing – the status quo and existing power dynamics.

Cindy Cohn: Would you introduce yourself?

Sure, I’m Agustina Del Campo and I direct the Center for Studies on Freedom of Expression and Access to Information (CELE) in Argentina.

Cohn: First, what does free speech mean to you?

Free speech means a lot of things to me, but it basically means the power to bring unpopular ideas to the mainstream. That is what free speech means to me. It’s the power of advocating for something.

Cohn: Wonderful. How do you think online speech should or shouldn’t be regulated?

Well, I think it should or shouldn’t be regulated in the same way that offline speech should or shouldn’t be regulated. The power of speech is basically not the power to share popular ideas, but the power to share unpopular ideas, and popular ideas are online and offline and they have an impact online and offline. We’ve been discussing the limits and the possibilities and the opportunities and the challenges for speech offline for a number of years, so I think in whatever we decide to do in online speech we should at least bear in mind the discussions that we had prior to getting to this new

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