Fifteen Eighty Four

The right to freedom of thought was a neglected right until recently. It was so overlooked that although article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights both state that everyone has the ‘right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion’, even legal scholars thought of those articles as only protecting freedom of conscience and religious freedom and belief. This omission might be excused because there have been no significant developments on the distinct right to freedom of thought by international human rights courts. Yet, the right to freedom of thought is protected in most international and regional human rights treaties and in the constitutions of many countries. Furthermore, the right to freedom of thought is a fundamental right that provides a foundation for other rights such as expression, religion, and privacy, so fleshing out its normative underpinnings also helps bolster our understanding of these other supported rights. Given technological developments that are increasingly capable of decoding and changing mental activity, the right has found a renewed application. However, there is no authority on what is meant by the ‘right to freedom of thought’. There is no consensus on what the right protects or how it can be used. There is little clarity on what exactly ‘thought’ means in this context, or what ‘freedom’ means. To begin developing the right, or for the right to achieve significant legal effect, it is necessary first to determine how thought is protected, how it is defined, and how the right can be given practical effect in different countries, against the background of different legal systems and relevant cultural traditions.

The Cambridge Handbook for the Right to Freedom of Thought (edited by Patrick O’Callaghan and Bethany Shiner, Cambridge University Press, 2025) is the first large-scale international survey of the right to freedom of thought as a distinct right. It is the first attempt to map out how it finds expression in positive law and how it is protected and applied globally. It contains chapters written by legal experts in eighteen selected jurisdictions, grouped by region, and context-setting chapters by leading scholars in the field. One hope for the Handbook is that by revealing how the courts in several jurisdictions have interpreted and applied the right, it will not only demonstrate that it is a right with utility but it will also help in the interpretation and application of the right in other jurisdictions, thus improving the international protection of the right.

At the outset of our study, we were faced with the risk that we would discover that no jurisdictions had developed the right in their case law or legislation. Each country chapter might have reported more or less the same thing: that the country’s law incorporated the international right to freedom of thought. Still, there was no elaboration on the right domestically. This would have resulted in a very dull book! Thankfully, that was not the case, and instead, new insights were recorded in the Handbook for the first time in English, making this information available to a much wider audience than before. For example, the Colombian Constitutional Court and the Japanese Supreme Court have both developed the right with such depth that there is emerging clarity on what it protects and how. Synthesising the findings from the Handbook, we can conceptualise the right as prohibiting at least the following:

1. compelling someone to have a particular thought and the indoctrination of ideas;
   1. forbidding people from having particular thoughts and punishing them for their thoughts;
   1. compelling someone to confess the existence of a particular thought or the forced disclosure of thoughts;
   1. unduly intrusive or inappropriate investigation of one’s thoughts;
   1. impermissible manipulation of one’s thoughts.

Another important aim of the Handbook was to expand the literature on the right. Until this Handbook, as far as we know, most research on the right published in English was from a trans-Atlantic perspective written by scholars in North America and Western Europe. We wanted to discover how this right is understood beyond North America and Western Europe, thus avoiding ethnocentric approaches and expanding the field of scholarship. As the right to freedom of thought is a neglected area of scholarship, we had to actively approach individual scholars we thought had the expertise to write about the right in their jurisdiction, even if this was not their normal area of research. Although we did both, this was a proactive process, not a passive one, depending solely on our existing networks or a call for submissions. But, we also supplemented these traditional methods of collating contributors with our own research and approaches to would-be contributors. Thankfully, everyone we approached was as excited as we were to research and write about the right.

In summary, we hope the Handbook achieves several things: 1. Helping place the right on the international human rights agenda, 2. It helps courts and legislators understand that the right has substantive content and can be operationalised for practical application. 3. Reveal the normative underpinnings of the right and how these differ by jurisdiction, often based on the socio-legal and political context of the jurisdiction, 4. Explore the potential practical use of this right, especially against the background of emerging socio-technical developments, 5. Become cognizant of the complexity inherent within the right through the context-setting chapters, 6. Offer a starting point for comparative analysis of the right.