IMMI

The Iceland Modern Media Initiative is the political programme adopted by the Icelandic Parliament in 2010, in the immediate aftermath of the WikiLeaks-broadcast Reykjavík cables, committing the state to becoming a deliberately permissive jurisdiction for the press. The resolution itself, Resolution 23/138, does not have direct legal force; what it has is a political mandate for the executive and the legislature to bring into Icelandic law the strongest available equivalents to thirteen named civil-liberties instruments, drawn from Belgian source-protection law, US freedom-of-information practice, Estonian internet-access constitutional protection, and similar models worldwide.

Implementation has been partial. The whistleblower-protection element has been enacted in administrative law and in the public-sector employment statute. The source-protection provisions have been strengthened in the Media Act. The libel-tourism shield — preventing Icelandic courts from enforcing foreign defamation judgments incompatible with Article 19 ICCPR — remains a political commitment without specific implementing text. The intermediary-liability limitations are operationally robust because the underlying Höfundalög does not import a DMCA-equivalent notice-and-takedown procedure.

For an offshore-hosting operator the practical consequence is asymmetric. The pieces that have been enacted give the operator concrete statutory cover — a Media Act source-protection clause is something a court will weigh in front of a foreign legal demand. The pieces that have not been enacted give the operator a political climate but no specific text to invoke; counsel relies on Resolution 23/138 as interpretive context rather than as binding law. The publication describes the regime honestly on both counts in the Iceland jurisdictional dossier.