Satire, Nazi Symbols, and Consistency in Strasbourg

Why the European Court of Human Rights' judgement in Mladina d.d. Ljubljana v Slovenia (No. 2) stands out.

In a decision this month, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR/Court) offered a rare moment of doctrinal clarity in its historically uneasy relationship with provocative expression under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Even more surprising is that the speech in question involved a satirical comparison to Nazi symbols and figures.

The judgment in Mladina d.d. Ljubljana v Slovenia (No.2) (2026) stands out not because it revolutionizes Article 10 jurisprudence, but because it faithfully applies principles the Court has long articulated but has routinely abandoned when expression becomes uncomfortable.

When read alongside other cases involving the use of totalitarian symbols, the ruling highlights the Court’s inconsistent and incoherent application of context-based analysis to historically charged imagery and language.

The Mladina Ruling

The ECtHR judgement arose from defamation proceedings against Mladina, a Slovenian political weekly known for its satirical section. At the time, the claimant, B.G., was a prominent opposition member of parliament for the Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS).

The controversy followed a public debate sparked by a Facebook post comparing B.G. to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels. Responding to that debate, Mladina published an editorial criticizing what it described as double standards in Slovenian journalism, drawing parallels between the political communication methods of the SDS and Nazi propaganda.

In the same issue, Mladinamit (the satirical section of the weekly) published a satirical piece mocking the comparison. Beneath it, two photographs were placed side by side, one of Goebbels with his family and the other of B.G. with his family, presented in an identical format. The photo of B.G. and his family had been taken at a large public religious event and had previously appeared in other media. B.G. subsequently brought defamation proceedings against the magazine.

Slovenian courts accepted that the textual criticism constituted protected political speech, but held that the photographic comparison crossed the line. Images, they reasoned, intruded more deeply into private life than text, and placing the politician’s family, particularly children, next to Goebbels’ family amounted to an unjustified attack on reputation. The magazine was ordered to publish an apology, publish the judgment, and pay damages.

The ECtHR disagreed and found a violation of Article 10. Central to the Court’s reasoning was the finding that the publication “contributed to a debate of general interest,” namely, the permissibility of comparing contemporary political methods with those of the Nazi era. Stressing that satire is a form of expression which “by its inherent features of exaggeration and distortion of reality, naturally aims to provoke and agitate,” the Court found that the domestic courts had failed to strike a fair balance between Article 10 and Article 8 (the right to private and family life).

While the juxtaposition of family photographs could engage the right to private life, the Court emphasized that the publication appeared in a clearly satirical section, concerned a well-known politician who had himself exposed his family to public attention, and was addressed to a limited and politically literate readership.

Was The Ruling Too Context-Specific?

Here, unlike in previous cases, the Court takes context, genre, and political function seriously, recognizing satire as a form of expression that operates precisely through exaggeration, discomfort, and symbolic provocation.

There are still some elements of this decision worthy of criticism. The Court assumes that readers of the magazine’s satirical section would readily understand the political context and message conveyed by the photographs, echoing the problematic audience-based reasoning seen in Féret v Belgium (2010).

In Féret, the Court justified restricting anti-immigrant, anti-Islam statements made by a politician and incorporated into publications of his party. In its judgment, the ECtHR noted that the statements were “inevitably of such a nature as to arouse, particularly among the less informed members of the public, feelings of distrust, rejection or hatred towards foreigners.” This premise was sharply criticized in a dissenting opinion for portraying members of the public as “nitwits… incapable of replying to arguments and counter-arguments, due to the irresistible drive of their irrational emotions.”

But this reasoning raises an uncomfortable question. Would the expression in Mladina have received the same level of protection had it appeared in a tabloid newspaper or been circulated randomly online? The Court’s ruling suggests that the answer may depend less on the content of the speech than on an abstract and deeply contestable assessment of the audience presumed to consume it.

The Court also highlighted the limited impact of the publication, noted the absence of any demonstrated serious harm to the politician’s own reputation, and recalled that “comparisons to the German Nazi regime do not automatically justify a conviction for defamation on the ground of the special stigma attached to the latter, especially if there exist special circumstances justifying such a comparison.”

The stigma attached to Nazism thus operates as a quasi-exclusionary category, shaping the analysis before balancing has meaningfully begun. This framing grants courts wide discretionary power to determine, ex post facto, what speech it finds tolerable. The Court presents “special circumstances” as factors capable of preventing an automatic restriction on Nazi comparisons.

In principle, this appears protective of Article 10, since it rejects the idea that such comparisons are per se defamatory. Yet the reasoning's structure is problematic. By foregrounding the “special stigma” of Nazism as the starting point, the Court implicitly treats Nazi comparisons as presumptively suspect, requiring contextual justification to escape sanction. “Special circumstances” are thus corrective as they may operate to neutralise a stigma that the Court has already elevated into a normative baseline.

Furthermore, the ECtHR rejected the domestic courts’ fragmentation of text and image, recalling that “the form of expression cannot be dissociated from its context and apparent goal.” This is a simple but often neglected position that satire must be assessed as satire. Readers do not encounter satirical publications by dissecting images and text in isolation. Satire is a composite form, one that Mladina recognizes. This contributed to the Court’s resistance to sanitizing political critique under the guise of protecting dignity.

Context, Satire, and the ECtHR’s Approach to Totalitarian Imagery

Satire relies on distortion and provocation to challenge power and dominant narratives. Its value lies precisely in its ability to unsettle. The ECtHR’s approach in Mladina aligns with its better satire jurisprudence, though that jurisprudence has not always been applied consistently. The Court has previously acknowledged that satire “aims to provoke and agitate,” and that its exaggerated nature must be taken into account when assessing alleged harm.

Mladina avoids this pitfall. Rather than asking whether the Nazi comparison was offensive in the abstract, the Court examined why the comparison was made and how it functioned within a broader political critique. This is consistent with the core Article 10 principle, that freedom of expression protects not only information or ideas that are favourably received, but also those that “offend, shock or disturb.”

Although Mladina was not framed as a hate speech case or as one concerning unconstitutional symbols, the use of Nazi figures and the Court’s explicit references to the German Nazi regime make comparison with its totalitarian-symbols case law both relevant and instructive.

The contrast between Mladina and Nix v Germany (2018) is stark. In the latter, the applicant used his personal blog to criticize the treatment of his German-Nepalese daughter by a State employment office, situating his posts within a broader public debate on discrimination against children from migrant backgrounds and families on social welfare. In one post, he illustrated his critique by reproducing a photograph of Heinrich Himmler in SS uniform bearing a swastika, alongside a historical quotation on Nazi education policy. He was convicted under German criminal law for using symbols of unconstitutional organizations (his libel charges were dropped at the domestic level). The ECtHR declared his Article 10 complaint inadmissible.

In Nix, the ECtHR emphasized that states marked by the legacy of Nazism, because of their history, “may be regarded as having a special moral responsibility to distance themselves from the mass atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis.” In doing so, it shifted the analysis from whether bans are permissible under Article 10 to an implicit suggestion that they may be obligatory. In this framework, the Court noted that the symbol in question, a photograph of Heinrich Himmler in SS uniform prominently displaying a swastika armband, “cannot be considered to have any other meaning than that of Nazi ideology.” The courts characterized the Nazi imagery as no more than an “eye-catching device,” devoid of any meaningful link to the substance of the blog post.

Accepting this reasoning, the ECtHR concluded that Nix’s use of SS symbols, figures, and uniform constituted a “gratuitous use of symbols,” which domestic law was entitled to prohibit. Mladina is significant precisely because it resists the prohibitionist reflex that marks Nix. What mattered in Mladina was whether the comparison was anchored in political critique and assessed in context. By contrast, in Nix, Nazi symbolism was treated as having a fixed, monolithic meaning that overrides intent, genre, and discursive function.

Importantly, the ECtHR has not symmetrically applied historical sensitivity as was the case in Nix. For example, in Behar and Gutman v Bulgaria (2021), which involved anti-Semitic speech by a politician, the Court noted that “the specific historical context in respect of Bulgaria, as opposed to that in respect of other European States, matters little in that regard.” In other words, the absence of a pronounced domestic history of anti-Semitism did not dilute the Court’s condemnation of such expression.

In Vajnai v Hungary (2008), which involved the prohibition of the wearing of the communist red star at a demonstration, the Court recognized the “terror” and “scars” left by communist regimes in countries such as Hungary, yet held that these emotional legacies, on their own, were insufficient to justify restrictions on Article 10.

Fáber v Hungary (2010) involved the prohibition of the striped Árpád flag, a medieval symbol later appropriated by Hungary’s fascist Arrow Cross Party, near two separate demonstrations. In finding a violation of Article 10, the ECtHR highlighted that “ill feelings or even outrage, in the absence of intimidation” could not justify restrictions on expression. A dissenting opinion emphasized that, in the Court’s earlier case law on Holocaust denial and related expression, both the Court and the Commission had consistently denied Convention protection to such speech.

Regrettably, the Court provided no detailed justification for this conclusion and failed to explain why a symbol associated with the Arrow Cross regime, whose ideology closely mirrored Nazism and which was responsible for the mass murder of Jews in Hungary, was treated differently from Nazi symbols. The question, of course, remains: had it been an actual Nazi flag or a Schutzstaffel flag, would the Court have reacted differently?

What Article 10 Could Look Like If Applied Consistently

Mladina matters because it shows that the Court can robustly apply Article 10, even in potentially controversial cases. It demonstrates that protecting political satire is compatible with historical sensitivity, that Nazi comparisons are not per se abusive, and that balancing exercises must focus on context, function, and risk rather than on symbolic absolutism. Mladina’s methodology should not be exceptional. The principles applied, holistic reading, genre sensitivity, and rejection of speculative harm, are not new. They are simply too often forgotten when expression becomes unsettling.

Freedom of expression is tested at its edges. Mladina reminds us what Article 10 looks like when the Court resists the temptation to retreat from its own standards. The question is whether it will do so consistently. The positive assessment of Mladina should nevertheless be treated with caution. In Nix, Germany’s Nazi past operated not merely as a contextual factor but as a justificatory engine for restriction, allowing historical exceptionalism to do all the work. In Behar and Gutman, the absence of a significant historical connection to Nazism in Bulgaria, compared to other European States, played no role in the Court’s assessment, reflecting the seriousness with which it treats anti-Semitic expression irrespective of national context.

While the Slovenian judgment marks a clear shift away from such exceptionalism, it leaves unresolved challenges, particularly the Court’s assumptions about the interpretive capacities of readers and the fact that the Nazi figures in question appeared in a non-German publication. Whether Mladina signals a lasting recalibration or remains an exception to the Court’s inconsistent approach to controversial speech remains to be seen.

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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.