Source protection

Source protection is the legal protection against compelled disclosure of the identity of a journalist’s confidential source. The European-law foundational authority is Goodwin v United Kingdom, decided by the European Court of Human Rights in 1996, which held that an order compelling a journalist to disclose his source breached Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights (freedom of expression) absent an overriding public-interest justification. The judgment is the authority on which subsequent ECHR source-protection jurisprudence builds.

National-law surfaces vary significantly. Sweden’s source-protection regime, derived from the Tryckfrihetsförordningen (Freedom of the Press Act) of 1949, is constitutionally entrenched and is the strongest in continental Europe — disclosure compulsion against journalists is criminally sanctioned, with limited exceptions. Iceland’s regime, strengthened through IMMI-derived reforms to the Media Act, is comparable in substance. Switzerland’s regime under the Federal Constitution (Article 17) and the Federal Act on the Media operates through privilege rather than criminal sanction; the privilege is robust against routine demands and contestable only on serious-crime grounds reviewed by court.

The weakest regimes are jurisdictions with no codified shield law. In those, source-protection rests on whatever Article 10 ECHR or Article 19 ICCPR jurisprudence the national courts have adopted, and the protection is correspondingly thinner and more dependent on individual cases. The United States operates without a federal shield statute; the protection rests on First Amendment doctrine that has been narrowed by lower-court rulings and that has not been definitively settled by the Supreme Court.

For an offshore-hosting operator hosting journalism — and OffshorePress is, structurally and editorially, a publisher of journalism in addition to a hosting operator — source-protection is the substantive reason the operating jurisdictions are Iceland and Switzerland rather than the United States or the United Kingdom. The legal cover the operator’s local regime affords its own publication is the same cover the regime affords the journalism the operator hosts, and the contact form handling is structured to surface source-protection considerations before any communication reaches the operator’s persistent systems.