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In less than two months, the Council of Europe is set to consider the adoption of a Political Declaration intended at “rebalancing” the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in immigration contexts. This language of altering an existing balance is deliberately slippery, but for the states advancing this agenda it clearly involves removing or weakening rights protections for migrants that have developed within ECHR jurisprudence. This is the thrust of the latest Outcome Document in preparation for the Conference taking place in Moldova.

These developments have attracted vigorous critique on their own terms. This post, however, considers their implications for the connected rights commitments made under the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement of 1998 (the 1998 Agreement). After decades of ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland, this Agreement marked a commitment to a shared society. This goal did not rely merely on goodwill and hopeful language, but was grounded upon litigable rights. The Agreement requires, as a baseline, that the UK and Ireland incorporate the ECHR into domestic law and to allow its rights to be enforceable in domestic courts. But it extends beyond this, with Theresa May, as Prime Minister during the Brexit negotiations, acknowledging that “the rights it enshrines” extend into EU law and ultimately acknowledging that the position of the UK Government at that juncture was that ‘the Belfast Agreement will be protected in full.’

The expansive rights commitments within this peace agreement made sense in a time of deepening international human rights protections, but are more difficult to reconcile with attempts to diminish such international protections. The states involved in the 1998 Agreement have not made a convincing case for how their advocacy of a new political declaration aligns with these commitments. If the 1998 Agreement’s rights commitments start from, and extend beyond, the ECHR rights, this cannot be reconciled with efforts to water down those rights and shackle the interpretive role of the Strasbourg Court.

Attempting to Backtrack on Rights Commitments

The 1998 Agreement was supposed to be grounded upon a foundation of human rights. After decades of ethno-nationalist conflict involving flagrant rights abuses, this was a shared commitment to a different sort of society. Nor was this, as some accounts of the Agreement would suggest, just about the two major communities in Northern Ireland. The rights chapter of the Agreement explicitly provides for the rights of “everyone in the community”. This commitment was underpinned by incorporating the ECHR into UK domestic law (including in Northern Ireland) under the Human Rights Act 1998. The states party to the 1998 Agreement, Ireland and the UK, signed up to this commitment as an Annex to their inter-state treaty element of the text.

In recent years, that foundation has come under threat. Rights protections for unpopular minorities frequently attract the ire of populist politicians, but now it is the UK Labour Party, which has long prided itself on being amongst the architects of the 1998 Agreement, that poses the most immediate threat. The UK’s Labour Government is actively promoting a new Political Declaration on the effect of the ECHR with the express aim of restricting the effect of these rights in immigration cases. As new drafting documents reveal the extent of these proposals, the question of how this accords with the UK’s 1998 Agreement commitments needs to be asked.

As commitments to rights in UK public discourse have wavered, politicians have offered a range of easy solutions to complex governance problems. For David Cameron, UK Prime Minister between 2010 and 2016, the answer was the restriction of the Human Rights Act 1998, the instrument that made the ECHR rights litigable in the UK’s domestic courts. Neither he nor his Conservative successors managed to achieve this in fourteen years in office.

More recently, both Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, both even more committed to simplistic solutions and the more drastic the better, have committed their parties (the Conservative Party and Reform UK) to withdrawing the UK from the ECHR should they take office. Any taint of pan-European arrangements suffices. What none of these proposals has ever successfully confronted, however, is how they accord with the commitments that the UK made to the people of Northern Ireland in 1998.

Successive Conservative Party plans to reform the Human Rights Act sought to sidestep the question; replacement human rights arrangements would be sufficiently similar to the existing arrangements to uphold the Good Friday Agreement obligations. Which always begged the question, if nothing was going to change, what was the point of the reform? With no clear answer to this question, and mired in the debates over and then realities of Brexit, the Human Rights Act continued to operate as enacted throughout the Conservative-led Governments of 2010 to 2024.

As for Farage, he shrugs that his plans might take a little longer to put into place in Northern Ireland because of the 1998 Agreement, without ever explaining what that means in the context of UK-wide commitments regarding the Council of Europe. Kemi Badenoch’s plans depend on the sleight-of-hand, within the 2025 Wolfson Report, that some rights protections can be provided in Northern Ireland law without troubling the rest of the UK, even though this undoubtedly hollows out the level of international oversight provided by the European Court.

The New Approach: Hollowing Out Rights

None of these plans have stood up to scrutiny. They all attempt to backtrack on the position for Northern Ireland, which the UK committed to in 1998 on an open-ended basis. The current UK Labour Government’s push for a new Political Declaration poses a different, but no less concerning, threat. Under pressure to be seen to be addressing immigration concerns, at a time when these reflect global instability more than any rights-based “pull factors”, Shabana Mahmood’s Home Office is actively seeking, alongside other ECHR states, to redraw how the Convention operates. If the boundaries of the ECHR itself shrink, can this be accommodated within commitments under the 1998 Agreement, which used the ECHR to define a minimum baseline of rights protections?

Keir Starmer’s Government is pushing forward this process within the Council of Europe’s Steering Committee on Human Rights, a process which will culminate in Moldova’s capital Chișinău where a High Level Conference meets in May to adopt a new political declaration on the ECHR’s application. The drafts emerging from this process indicate that many states are pushing to curtail the application of rights. The key questions which remain outstanding are how far the state parties to the Convention are willing to go in “rebalancing” rights protections and whether the implications of these changes will stop at migration cases.

The path to Chișinău is paved with suggestions of a multi-tiered rights order, in which rights protections will in future operate in a watered-down manner in immigration contexts. The European Court is enjoined to avoid “unnecessary constraints on decisions to extradite, or to expel foreign nationals”. The most recent Outcome Document from the pre-Conference Steering Committee, moreover, selectively quotes the Court’s decisions to assert that the severity threshold for inhuman and degrading treatment should be lower in cases involving a state’s own actions than where there is a “real risk” of such treatment if someone is expelled to a non-ECHR country (underplaying more recent case law).

The immediate goal of this shift is to make it easier for states signed up to the Convention to expel foreign nationals by requiring them to demonstrate more severe ill treatment than is currently the case. Sometimes this is almost farcical, with the drafters repeatedly acknowledging that the new political declaration could recognize the restrictive nature of the Court’s existing case law around such claims; “the quality of accessible healthcare in the receiving State should only give rise to a real risk of treatment contrary to Article 3 in very exceptional circumstances described in the Court’s case-law”. In short, the Court’s approach is already pitched to meet the minimum requirements of other international measures, such as Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention and Article 3 of the UN Convention Against Torture. The desired “wiggle room” that states are pursuing is largely illusory.

The singling out of migrants under this process is, in itself, deeply problematic. It strikes at the core of the universality of rights protections, and of itself undermines the promise of the 1998 Agreement. As the Northern Ireland courts have confirmed, the assertion of the rights of “everyone in the community” very much includes the rights of immigrants. But when it comes to posturing over immigration, the Irish Government is as eager as its London counterparts to advance the new Political Declaration.

The UK and Irish governments, as co-guarantors of the 1998 Agreement, have not explained how their enthusiastic advocacy of a process that is designed to hollow out the rights of immigrants in Northern Ireland reflects these commitments. Florid assertions of the significance of the “letter and spirit” of the 1998 Agreement are in short supply. Instead, ministers have adopted more euphemistic language about the Moldova process to deflect concerns around its impact; ‘We are working with international partners to modernise the application of the ECHR … entirely consistent with our obligations under the GFA [the 1998 Agreement]”.

These proposals, moreover, are unlikely to stay confined to immigration contexts, but will instead potentially compromise the general operation of the Convention. The Court is repeatedly urged in the drafting documents to recognise the particular authority of states in relation to security determinations. Given the extensive jurisprudence attesting to the limits to the European Court’s supervisory role where security is at issue, the drafting marks out an effort to underline the primacy of national authorities over such questions which spills over from immigration into the ECHR’s general workings.

Conclusion: Promises Betrayed

During the conflict in Northern Ireland, the oversight of the European Court was essential to asserting minimal rights protections in security contexts. From challenges to inhuman and degrading treatment, to prolonged pre-charge detention, to uses of lethal force by the authorities, it was only this level of international oversight, in avowedly security contexts, that provided a meaningful constraint on UK Government policy. In the words of Northern Ireland’s Lady Chief Justice, “[i]t is against this backdrop of human rights development that the Good Friday Agreement was brought into being”.

The 1998 Agreement was supposed to embed these rights in domestic law, meaning that claimants would not always have to pursue cases to the European Court to see their rights vindicated. Under these proposals, in key cases where security is at issue, rights will have much less purchase in domestic tribunals or before the European Court. A spill over from immigration cases is likely to result, with some states hoping for a more pliant approach from Strasbourg across security-related cases. But even if the Political Declaration is confined to immigration cases, it remains an affront to the concept of rights being enjoyed by “everyone in the community”. This was not the future that the 1998 Agreement promised.

The post Hollowing Out Human Rights appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

In recent weeks, several X (Twitter) and Meta users have reported that their posts and accounts were blocked in India following government orders issued under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. According to reports, affected users received automated notifications from X stating that their posts had been blocked in response to a legal demand attributed to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, but no explanation was provided for the action. The notifications reportedly stated that the platform was “unable to provide additional information due to legal restrictions,” leaving those affected with little clarity about why their content had been restricted.

These blocking orders highlight a broader problem with India’s internet blocking regime. Section 69A of the Information Technology Act permits the government to block online information only on specific grounds, such as sovereignty, national security, public order, or the prevention of incitement to offences.

Yet the recent instances of blocking indicate that such actions are not confined to clearly unlawful content but also extend to speech critical of the government. Several users have reported that their restricted content included political commentary and public affairs that were critical of the central government or Prime Minister Modi. While these actions appear targeted at individual posts or accounts, they reflect a broader pattern in India’s approach to online regulation. At earlier junctures, such as during the farmers’ protests, the government resorted to wholesale blocking of accounts and platforms, affecting journalists, activists, and protest-related networks. The government had even threatened X with legal action, including the arrest of its officials, in response to pushback from the tech giant. As during the farmers’ protests, the Indian government is once again facing significant criticism, this time over its diplomatic handling of the Middle Eastern crisis. The recent blocking measures appear to mirror its earlier response. This continuity suggests a sustained reliance on opaque restrictions to manage online speech, particularly where it involves political dissent.

The Power to Block Online Content

Section 69A of the Information Technology Act 2000 bestows upon the Indian government the power to block public access to information on the internet.

It allows the state to issue directions to intermediaries to remove information if it is deemed to be against the interests of sovereignty and integrity of the country, defence and security of the State, friendly relations with foreign states, public order, or prevention of incitement to the commission of a cognisable offence.

The IT (Procedure and Safeguards for Blocking for Access of Information by Public) Rules, 2009 provide the procedure to be followed in case of blocking. Under these rules, a designated officer is appointed by the central government to process blocking requests. Requests submitted by nodal officers of organisations under the Act are examined by an executive review committee chaired by this designated officer to determine whether the content falls within the grounds specified in Section 69A.

The designated officer should identify the intermediary or person hosting the information and issue a notice seeking clarification before blocking. After considering the reply of the concerned party, a blocking order can be issued. The rules also include emergency provisions under Rule 9, which allow blocking without prior notice in urgent situations. While earlier only the designated officer had the authority to issue blocking orders, the Intermediary Guidelines Rules, 2021, empowered the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting to impose content-blocking orders.

The Problem of Secret Blocking Orders

One of the most controversial provisions in the blocking framework is Rule 16 of the Blocking Rules, which provides strict confidentiality relating to actions taken under the rules. This confidentiality clause, along with the emergency provision, allows the government to block access to information without providing a reasoned public order or notifying the originator of the content. The state, in many instances, also refuses to provide the orders even if the owners of the blocked information file a Right to Information (RTI) petition, citing confidentiality. The lack of a reasoned order makes it very difficult to appeal these orders before the courts.

The use of Section 69A for blocking entire accounts is also problematic.  The provision empowers the government to issue orders to take down the content that is “generated, transmitted, stored” by an intermediary, suggesting that its scope is limited to existing information. Blocking entire accounts goes beyond this, as it not only punishes present infringements but also operates as a pre-emptive restriction on future content.

In most of these cases, the government chooses to invoke the emergency provision to avoid due procedures being followed in the event of blocking, including providing notices and conducting a hearing.

What the Supreme Court Permitted and the Subordinate Courts Interpreted

The Supreme Court of India upheld the constitutionality of Section 69A and the blocking rules in the landmark judgment of Shreya Singhal v. Union of India.

The Court held that Section 69A is a narrowly drawn provision accompanied by procedural safeguards. It noted that blocking could only be resorted to when the central government was satisfied that it was necessary to do so on the grounds specified in the statute, which mirror the reasonable restrictions to free speech provided under Article 19(2) of the Indian Constitution. The Court also emphasised that reasons must be recorded in writing before issuing blocking directions.

The Court also emphasised the procedural framework established under the Blocking Rules as another safeguard, which requires the involvement of a designated officer and an examination committee before a final blocking order is issued. These procedures were considered important in ensuring that blocking powers were exercised in a structured and accountable manner and provided the opportunity of judicial review.

The Delhi High Court in Tanul Thakur v. Union of India also emphasised the need for transparency regarding blocking orders. In this case, a satirical website was blocked under Section 69A without providing a hearing notice or a copy of the blocking order. The court directed the government to provide the petitioner with the blocking order and ordered that a post-decisional hearing be granted.

While the Supreme Court has set out procedural safeguards, the Karnataka High Court’s shift away from the narrow, safeguards-oriented reading of Section 69A adopted in Shreya Singhal has enabled the government to carry out this level of blocking.

In X Corp v. Union of India, the Karnataka High Court upheld a series of blocking orders that extended not only to specific content but to entire user accounts, treating such measures as preventive and proportionate, considering the nature of online harm. The Court also accepted that confidentiality under Rule 16 could justify withholding detailed reasons and held that notifying the intermediary alone was sufficient, without mandating notice to individual users. It further declined to meaningfully engage with challenges based on proportionality and procedural fairness and limited the platform’s ability to contest the orders on behalf of affected users.

While the Court had the opportunity to address the merits of the blocking orders but chose not to, relying solely on the superficial procedural compliance. This expansive interpretation departs from the Supreme Court’s characterisation of Section 69A as a narrowly tailored provision with robust procedural safeguards, and in doing so, risks diluting the very safeguards that formed the basis for its constitutional validity.

Conclusion

The secrecy surrounding blocking orders has significant implications for constitutional rights. Internet blocking directly implicates the freedom of speech and expression guaranteed under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution of India, which includes the right to disseminate and receive information. When restrictions to free speech are imposed without providing reasons, it becomes very difficult to ascertain if these actions satisfy the conditions under Article 19(2). Transparency in the procedure is also essential to ensure that the limitations on free speech remain narrowly confined. And over time, such opacity creates a chilling effect on online speech, as users self-censor and avoid discussing politically sensitive topics.

Although the Supreme Court has stated that the constitutionality of 69A of the IT Act is due to the procedural safeguards, the application of the emergency provision and the confidentiality clause in the blocking rules essentially bypass these safeguards by blocking judicial oversight over executive orders.

The Karnataka High Court’s endorsement of this mass blocking exercise also granted the government the freedom to continue with this approach with impunity.

When individuals are not informed of the reasons behind a restriction or provided with the relevant orders, it becomes nearly impossible to challenge the decision or seek meaningful judicial review. As a result, executive blocking powers operate largely outside public scrutiny.

The Supreme Court has issued notice to the Central Government on a petition filed in March 2025, challenging Rule 16 and Rule 9 of the IT Blocking Rules 2009. The outcome of this case may determine whether India’s internet-blocking regime continues to operate in secrecy or moves toward greater transparency and accountability.

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With the increasing proliferation of deepfakes and rapid development of artificial intelligence, Denmark has become the first country in the European Union to specifically protect one’s image and voice with a new legislative initiative. As of 31 March 2026, a new intellectual property right is expected to enter into force, modelled as a neighbouring right to copyright law and specifically designed to protect a person’s voice and physical appearance. Traditionally, voice and image have been protected as personality rights that are not transferable, primarily defensive in nature, and only partially commercial. Denmark’s new legislation marks a significant departure from this tradition by reconceptualising voice and image as intellectual property rights, making them potentially transferable and commercially exploitable.

While this step is important, particularly for performers, it cannot replace personality rights, which remain indispensable in cases such as deepfake pornography. Furthermore, given the inherently cross-border nature of deepfake cases, a purely national solution will not suffice.

Deepfakes and the right to one’s own image

Deepfakes are digital manipulations of image, video, or audio material and give rise to a range of risks. They are frequently used to produce so-called deepfake pornography, can be employed for political misrepresentation or the spread of misinformation and, moreover, make it possible to imitate artists, for instance by generating new songs or films with their voice and appearance.

What these scenarios have in common is that virtually any deepfake depicting a natural person interferes with an individual’s right to their own image, irrespective of whether the person concerned is a public figure or a private individual. What distinguishes them, however, is the nature of the harm involved and, consequently, the protective aim pursued. Deepfake pornography primarily harms the individual depicted, interfering with their intimate sphere and personal dignity. Deepfake music and film production similarly affect the individual but shift the focus towards the economic value associated with their identity. Political deepfakes, by contrast, pose a threat not so much to the politician depicted as to the public at large, undermining informed debate and democratic discourse. The protective aim is here less about safeguarding the individual and more about protecting society from manipulation and misinformation.

At the European level, the right to one’s own image is derived from Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which guarantees the right to respect for private and family life. According to the case law of the European Court of Human Rights, this right encompasses an individual’s control over the use of their image. A comparable approach can be found in French law. Article 9 of the Civil Code protects privacy (vie privée) and thus forms the basis of the French right to one’s image (droit à l’image), which, although not codified, has been developed through judicial decisions. In Germany, the right to one’s own image is recognised both at the level of statutory law and constitutional law. At the statutory level, it is primarily governed by sections 22 and 23 of the Kunsturhebergesetz (Copyright Act for Artistic Works). At the constitutional level, it is understood as an aspect of the general right of personality, derived from Article 1(1) in conjunction with Article 2(1) of the Grundgesetz (Basic Law).

By contrast, the position in the Anglo-American legal sphere is markedly different. The United Kingdom does not recognise a freestanding general right of personality, nor a specific right to one’s own image. Historically, this approach has been justified, inter alia, on the basis that images are generally regarded as carriers of information, the dissemination of which may serve a legitimate public interest and for the freedom of expression. In the United States a distinction is drawn between the Right of Privacy and the Right of Publicity. Whereas the former protects an individual’s private sphere, the latter enables, in particular public figures, to control the commercial exploitation of their name, image, or identity. In several U.S. states this right is expressly conceptualised as a form of intellectual property right.

A regulatory gap

Deepfakes present a novel legal challenge in a number of respects and expose a potential regulatory gap. In response, several Member States of the European Union, most recently Denmark, have begun to pursue legal approaches that increasingly resemble those found in the United States. This development suggests a possible shift in the conceptualisation of the right to one’s own image: traditionally framed as a personality right in most continental European countries, it may gradually be recast along the lines of an intellectual property right. This shift, however, has attracted criticism. Accordingly, the right to one’s own image is intrinsically and closely linked to the personality of the individual depicted and should therefore not be an economic intellectual property right.

However, what distinguishes deepfakes from earlier technological developments, such as photography, which historically prompted the emergence of image rights as a response to the unprecedented ability to reproduce a person’s image without their consent, is that deepfakes merely generate avatars rather than reproducing real moments from a private or public life. Existing control mechanisms in this area are therefore largely limited to injunctive relief and defensive claims. Furthermore, the notion that images inherently convey a form of “truth” must now be regarded as outdated. Deepfakes do not represent the underlying personality, but rather the body as a mere external form. Whereas economic value was traditionally created through an individual’s artistic works, such as songs or performances, that value is now increasingly attached to the body itself, to the “shell”, which, although it cannot be entirely separated from the personality, can nevertheless be distinguished from it far more clearly than in the past, when images were assumed to depict the real person and an authentic moment. Licencing one’s appearance remains problematic in most European jurisdictions, as the human body cannot be “sold”. However, the issue here is not the commodification of the body itself, but rather the use of a person’s digital representation.

In certain respects, therefore, deepfakes nonetheless exhibit parallels with copyright law. In jurisdictions such as Germany and France, copyright follows the model of Author’s Rights, encompassing not only economic rights but also moral rights that protect the personal bond between author and work. Accordingly, copyright in continental Europe maintains a strong personality-based dimension. By contrast, the United Kingdom and the United States adhere more closely to a copyright model that primarily emphasises economic exploitation rights.

In both German and French law, an intellectual property-based approach to image rights is generally rejected so far. However, economic rights in relation to one’s image are already recognised, but whether these must be explicitly regulated under intellectual property law remains an open question. For example, the Bundesgerichtshof (German Federal Court of Justice) has not yet ruled definitively on this matter.

New intellectual property right

Denmark is currently pursuing an approach that is also being actively debated for adoption in the Netherlands. The Danish approach is particularly noteworthy in that it distinguishes between two categories of individuals: ordinary persons and performers. On the one hand, performers, understood as performing artists who do not hold copyright in the underlying work but instead enjoy rights in their performance, are to be granted specific rights over their voice and appearance. On the other hand, the proposed framework seeks to extend protection to individuals who are not performers. Denmark’s initiative does not extend copyright to cover voice and image, but rather creates an entirely new intellectual property right, modelled on the neighbouring rights already familiar from copyright law, such as those enjoyed by performers or broadcasters.

However, there remain strong voices arguing that the right to one’s own image should continue to be conceptualised as a personality right. One major advantage of this approach lies in its close connection to the individual. The human body and personality are inherently intertwined; it is difficult, if not impossible, to separate a person’s physical appearance from their identity. In this sense, the right to one’s own image is fundamentally an expression of personality. This understanding is particularly relevant in light of the reality of deepfakes. A significant proportion of deepfake content, often cited as around 96 per cent, consists of pornographic material, disproportionately affecting women and children. Such uses clearly implicate personal dignity and identity, reinforcing the view that protection should be grounded in personality rights. In this context, P. Bernt Hugenholtz argues that different harms associated with deepfakes should be addressed within their respective legal frameworks. In particular, misinformation primarily concerns the protection of the public rather than the individual depicted. In such cases, regulatory measures, such as transparency obligations, may be sufficient. This approach is reflected, for instance, in the Article 50 EU AI Act, which introduces transparency requirements for AI-generated content, while deepfake pornography is more appropriately addressed within the scope of personality rights.

However, there are also disadvantages to this approach when applied to deepfake usage. Personality rights primarily function as defensive rights, which may lead to gaps in protection. A significant gap arises from the imbalance between the stronger economic protection afforded to creative works and the comparatively weak protection afforded to a person’s voice and physical appearance. While copyright holders benefit from a well-developed system of economic rights, including licensing, transferability and enforcement mechanisms, no equivalent comprehensive framework exists for personal attributes such as likeness and voice. This asymmetry becomes particularly evident in deepfake cases and complicates, among other things, the assessment of damages due to the absence of established valuation standards. In practice, image and voice are increasingly subject to commercial exploitation through contractual and licensing arrangements. The economic value of the right to one’s own image is therefore likely to continue to rise in the future. Moreover, robust protection of image and voice rights may help to preserve the incentive structure underlying copyright, which is already under pressure from AI, by encouraging the creation of art and new works without fear of unauthorised exploitation.

This reflects a broader shift in which voice and appearance are treated as economic assets. From this perspective, recognising an intellectual property dimension in the right to one’s own image aligns with current market realities.

Conclusion and outlook

Reconceptualising the right to one’s own image, particularly for performers, as an intellectual property right is necessary to address the growing commercial exploitation of voice and appearance in the digital age. Such a framework, must, however, incorporate moral rights at least as strong as those found in continental European copyright law, if not stronger, given the uniquely personal nature of the attributes at stake. Unlike a mere economic right, as seen in the United States, this would ensure that the personality interests underlying voice and image remain protected even where commercial exploitation is permitted.

In other situations, especially cases involving deepfake pornography, stricter measures are required, many of which are more appropriately rooted in personality rights. Deepfake misinformation cases, however, present a particular challenge. They raise more direct conflicts with freedom of expression and pursue a somewhat different protective aim, as they are concerned not only with safeguarding the individual depicted but also with protecting the public from deception and manipulation.

It appears unlikely that countries such as France or Germany with strong personality rights will take immediate legislative action in this area. However, the European legislator may be better positioned to address these issues at a supranational level, not least in order to prevent forum shopping. Harmonisation at the European level is particularly important in light of digitalisation and the inherently cross-border nature of these cases. The European Union has already begun to respond to these challenges, most notably through the EU AI Act.

Nevertheless, significant questions remain, particularly with regard to implementation and enforcement. Violations of personality and intellectual property rights on the internet are likely to persist, and the cross-border dimension will often make it difficult, if not impossible, to identify and hold perpetrators accountable. European states have attempted to address this issue, in part through criminal law measures, as reflected for example in provisions such as a newly proposed § 201 b of the German Criminal Code in Germany and the Article 226-8 Code Pénal in France.

The introduction of a new intellectual property right in respect of voice and appearance is a meaningful step forward, and one that extends protection to both performers and ordinary people, giving both categories a robust right over their digital likeness. It can, however, only address certain categories of deepfake cases. The deeper challenge remains one of implementation and enforcement, and it is here that the European Union has the opportunity to take meaningful steps towards advancing coherent protection across the European legal space.

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