Blurred Lines: Death Threats, Hate Speech, and the European Court of Human Rights
A recent judgment from the European Court of Human Rights further stretches the boundaries of hate speech under European human rights law.
Valeria Ilareva, Lidia Staykova, and Krasimir Kanev are human rights defenders in Bulgaria. Ilareva worked as a lawyer in the field of immigration, Staykova volunteered with the State Agency for Refugees, and Kanev headed the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee.
In January of 2015, they were subjected to a barrage of Facebook posts that included explicit death threats and incitement to violence. One user wrote: “Damn, how these monsters mock us? … I feel like shooting them, there are loads of vermin to eliminate.” Another wrote: “Die, carrion. Cyanide for you and for all traitors to the nation.” A third posted: “I say hang them at Parliament, exhibit them there as Christmas decorations so that their bones hang there forever.” Others suggested skinning the applicants alive or smearing them with honey and leaving them to be devoured in an ants’ nest. The messages spread quickly. A photomontage depicting the applicants as “Freaks of the Year” was shared over one hundred and twenty times in four days.
The threats were not abstract.
Ilareva explained that her office address was easily searchable online, while Kanev was later physically attacked in Sofia after appearing on television to criticise anti-immigrant rhetoric. They also filed complaints with the prosecutor’s office, arguing that the posts amounted to death threats, incitement to violence, and hate speech.
Yet prosecutors opened proceedings only under Article 162 of the Bulgarian Criminal Code, the hate speech provision, and declined to pursue the more obvious charge of threats under Article 144 of the Code. Investigations quickly stalled, ostensibly because IP addresses could not be obtained, and prosecutors dismissed the comments as “negative assessments” that could not cause “a justified fear” because they had been made on the internet.
Importantly, in relation to Article 162, national authorities found that the applicants could not fall within the sphere of this article as they did not qualify as victims, which would be the minority groups themselves. When Ilareva, Staykova, and Kanev found no recourse with Bulgarian authorities, they brought their case before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR/Court/Strasbourg).
But the ECtHR did not just examine the application (or lack thereof) of the Criminal Code as it relates to death threats. Instead, the Court’s judgment in Ilareva and Others v. Bulgaria (2025) further stretched hate speech doctrine as defined by the ECtHR in ways that will create a confusing hierarchy of harms and undermine clear and consistent law when it comes to freedom of expression.
The ECtHR’s Judgement
This debate sits within a broader human rights framework. Article 4 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and Article 20 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights specifically prohibit certain types of speech.
The European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) takes a different approach: Article 10 protects the right to freedom of expression, subject to limitations such as safeguarding the rights of others, but it does not impose an explicit duty on States to restrict speech. Over time, however, the ECtHR has developed such duties through its jurisprudence.
Victims of alleged hate speech often bring claims under Article 8, the right to private and family life, read together with Article 14, which prohibits discrimination. In almost systematically finding in favour of applicants, the result has been a creeping doctrine of positive obligations, where States are expected to investigate and respond to hate speech as part of their Convention duties.
In Ilareva, the applicants relied on Articles 3 (the prohibition of torture, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment) and 8 of the Convention, alone or in conjunction with Articles 13 (right to an effective remedy) and 14 of the Convention.
The ECtHR unanimously found a violation of Article 8 in conjunction with Article 14. The Court stressed that States’ obligations to protect fundamental rights apply online as much as offline. It criticised the Bulgarian authorities for narrowing the scope of the investigation, refusing to treat the applicants as victims of hate speech, and downplaying the seriousness of the threats.
As such, instead of grounding the violation firmly in Article 8, the Court layered its analysis in Article 14 and constructed a narrative of hate speech by association.
What Is Hate Speech by Association?
Here is the crux of the problem: the Court did not say Ilareva and her colleagues were victims of hate speech because they were part of a vulnerable group. Instead, it said they were victims because they helped vulnerable groups.
In the Court’s words, the threats and incitement they faced were tied to “their association, through their professional activities, with the groups of people for whose rights they worked.” Specifically, the Court noted that:
“the threats, incitement to violence and hate speech, motivated by intolerance and prejudice and directed against the applicants because of their association, through their professional activities, with the groups of people for whose rights they worked, remained virtually without legal consequences, and the applicants were not provided with the required protection of their right to personal integrity.”
That reasoning is part of a broader pattern. The Court has slowly been expanding who can be considered a victim of hate speech.
In Aksu v Turkey (2012), the Court recognised that negative Roma stereotypes could fall under Article 8 but ultimately found no violation of this right, emphasising the academic nature of the publications in question. In Beizaras and Levickas v Lithuania (2020), the Court confronted homophobic Facebook comments such as “into the gas chamber with the pair of them” and found a violation of Articles 8 and 14 when authorities failed to investigate. In Behar and Gutman v Bulgaria (2021) and Budinova and Chaprazov v Bulgaria (2021), the Court extended protection to communities as a whole, finding violations of Article 8 in conjunction with Article 14 in response to anti-Semitic and anti-Roma rhetoric by a far-right politician, even though there were no direct targets of this speech.
Most recently, in Minasyan and Others v Armenia (2025), the Court held that activists could be victims of hate speech because they were described in a newspaper as “enemies of the nation” for supporting LGBT rights. The case did not involve threats of violence but reputational attacks and calls for exclusion. The Court nonetheless found violations of Articles 8 and 14, reasoning that the applicants were targeted because of their perceived association with the LGBT community. As I noted in a previous piece, this judgment demonstrates “a clear broadening of the Court’s understanding of who can be affected by hate speech.”
Taken together, these cases show a steady expansion of the Court’s approach. In Aksu, the Court acknowledged that stereotyping could be harmful but still maintained the right to freedom of expression. By Minasyan and now Ilareva, that principle has stretched into an open-ended doctrine. Even death threats, which by their nature may fall outside the protection of Article 10, can now be reframed as hate speech when directed at activists because of their associative role.
The grave danger of the move in Ilareva and Others is that it dramatically enlarges the reach of the hate speech doctrine as applied by the Court. By extending hate speech protection to those associated with vulnerable groups, the Court risks eroding the distinction between threats directed at individuals and hate speech directed to the groups themselves.
In this formulation, almost any hostile remark linked to prejudice may be subsumed into the hate speech framework, leaving the category overly broad and imprecise. Moreover, applicants to the court are reclassified as victims of hate speech by association because of their professional or political work.
Suppose an LGBTQ + ally is told, “You deserve to be killed for supporting gay rights.” The gravity of that expression lies in the explicit death threat. But under the Court’s approach, it could instead be reframed as hate speech by association, because the activist is targeted for their solidarity with a vulnerable community. This not only creates conceptual confusion but could also construct a path to a hierarchy of an inherently abominable and unprotected act, that of a death threat.
Conclusion
The speech in question was neither just offensive nor a vague expression of hostility. It included explicit threats of lethal violence against named individuals, disseminated widely, and accompanied by tangible risks given the public visibility of the applicants. In other words, this speech was categorically outside the protection of freedom of expression under international human rights law.
The very problem of the case on a national level was that the authorities did not examine the crime related to death threats, but instead, focused on hate speech. The ECtHR’s focus should have been on that point. Was the expression not severe enough to fulfil the requirements of the relevant provision of the Criminal Code on death threats? If not, why not? If so, then it should have conducted an assessment under Article 8.
Moreover, had the applicants been subjected to death threats on account of their own protected characteristics, such as sexual orientation or ethnicity, the matter would have fallen squarely within the very rationale for the existence of hate speech laws. Extending protection to those targeted due to their association with protected groups risks diluting the normative clarity and purpose of such laws, without a compelling justification. What required proper investigation in this case was the sheer gravity of a death threat as such, not the alleged or speculative motives underlying it.
The danger is that hate speech becomes a catch-all, applied wherever prejudice is allegedly in the background. This approach obscures the standalone severity of death threats and expands hate speech and Article 14 into new terrain. The Court’s message should have been clear: harassment of activists is not to be tolerated under any circumstances, no matter the reason.
From Aksu to Beizaras and Levickas, from Budinova and Chaprazov to Minasyan, and now in Ilareva, Strasbourg has steadily expanded its positive obligations framework. States have an obligation to investigate hate speech even when the direct victims of hate speech are not the Court’s applicants. While the threats in this case should have been investigated as such (and not as hate speech), recent case law taken together demonstrates that Strasbourg pushes the boundaries of positive obligations in relation to hate speech. The result is that the stakes are getting higher.
The Court needs to establish a clear and consistent framework to justify this expansion. Without it, its uneven reasoning and judicial overreach risks not only weakening protection for vulnerable groups but also chipping away at the core of free expression.
Natalie Alkiviadou is a Senior Research Fellow at The Future of Free Speech. Her research interests lie in the freedom of expression, the far-right, hate speech, hate crime, and non-discrimination.