This lecture will address legal questions which arise in our digital age relating to democracy, elections and the right to freedom of expression as guaranteed under the European Convention of Human Rights. Judge O'Leary will explore whether and where there may be gaps in the existing Strasbourg case-law when it comes to the type of electoral and expression questions which now arise and whether some of the underlying principles which have informed some Strasbourg case-law on Article 10 to date might be ripe for reconsideration.

Síofra O'Leary is the Judge elected in respect of Ireland at the European Court of Human Rights. Appointed in 2015, she has served as the President of the Fifth Section since January 2020 and as the Vice-President of the Court since January 2022.

Prior to joining the European Court of Human Rights, Judge O’Leary worked for almost two decades at the Court of Justice of the European Union in judicial and administrative capacities.

In parallel to her work at both European courts, Judge O’Leary is a Visiting Professor at the College of Europe in Bruges where she has taught LLM courses on EU law and the individual, EU Social Law and Policy, as well as participating in an annual judicial workshop. She served on the Editorial Board of the Common Market Law Review and is now a member of both its Advisory Board and the Board of the Irish Centre for European Law and a member of the Society of Legal Scholars. In 2016 she was elected an Honorary Bencher of the Honorable Society of King’s Inns.

A graduate of University College Dublin (BCL) and a postgraduate of the European University Institute (PhD), Judge O’Leary was previously the Assistant Director for the Centre of European Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Emmanuel College, a Visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Law, University College Dublin, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cádiz, Spain and a Research Associate at the Institute for Public Policy Research in London. She is the author of two books entitled The Evolving Concept of Community Citizenship (Kluwer, 1996) and Employment Law at the European Court of Justice (Hart Publishing, 2001) and has published extensively in academic journals and legal monographs on the protection of fundamental rights in EU law and under the ECHR, EU employment law, the free movement of persons and services and EU citizenship generally.