Academic CentreCicero wrote that “freedom is participation in power”.[1] Power is both a guarantee of person’s freedom and a threat of a person or a group of persons being pushed away from power or becoming a minority in the democratic process, while others decide, instead of them, the matters that have a direct impact on a person’s life, denying a person the freedom to decide for oneself.
The state power uses law to define and ensure the limits of human freedom. Since the times of Enlightenment, the Western civilisation has worked incessantly to secure, through law, human dignity and the freedom of every person that follows from it, first and foremost, as self-determination. To achieve this, the modern state was created, tasked with ensuring the fundamental human rights, while international human rights and courts have been established to effect the implementation of these rights.
The speed, at which the scope of human rights has grown, is unbelievable, rapidly expanding the limits of human freedom. This has been facilitated by processes of democratisation and recognition of liberal values, as well as by technological development. In the first catalogues of human rights, created in countries of the world since the end of the 18th century, obligations of man were listed alongside human rights; however, in the second part of the 20th century, the citizen’s obligations, mostly, vanished from constitutions.
At the beginning of the 21st century, the issue of the limits of human liberty, their correlation with public interests and citizen’s obligations, has gained new relevance. The fact that revisiting the limits of personal liberty entered the legislators’ agenda was determined by the processes taking place in the world: epidemic, warfare, economic instability, hybrid war, terrorism and other circumstances that tore nations out of their customary, well-ordered lives where each person, year after year, enjoyed ever greater self-determination.
Due to the new circumstances, the states, introducing a state of emergency or exception, had to significantly restrict every person’s freedom, to protect the person himself or herself[2] or the entire society. However, are these restrictions justifiable, do they not infringe upon the core of a person’s fundamental rights, are the circumstances that demanded restrictions on a person’s freedom temporary or is this the new reality to which we, as a society, must succumb to… A number of unanswered questions have entered the agenda of scholars, first of all, the scholars of law. To find answers to the questions raised, on 9–10 November 2023, the Faculty of Law of the University of Latvia organised the international scientific conference “Revisiting the Limits of Freedom While Living Under Threat”, in which Latvian scholars together with their partners of cooperation from abroad discussed personal liberty and revisiting its borders, restricting fundamental rights in emergency circumstances, examining problematic issues in various areas of law, from public to criminal law. Part of the opinions expressed at the conference have been collected in this volume.
I hope that the published opinions will stir further discussions about every person’s right to self-determination as an essential precondition for the values and the existence of a democratic state, governed by the rule of law.
Dr. iur. Prof. Sanita Osipova
[1] Cicero on the Republic. Available: www.attalus.org/cicero/republic1a.html [seen 24.04.2024]
[2] Of course, the issue, of whether, in recognising a person’s right to self-determination, a person may be protected against his or her own mistakes, should be taken into account. The right to err is part of private autonomy.
Brīvības robežu pārskatīšana, dzīvojot apdraudējumu apstākļos. I. Latvijas Universitātes Juridiskās fakultātes 9. starptautiskās zinātniskās konferences rakstu krājums = Revisiting the Limits of Freedom While Living Under Threat. I. The first collection of research papers in conjunction with the 9th International Scientific Conference of the Faculty of Law of the University of Latvia. Rīga: LU Akadēmiskais apgāds, 2024. 312 lpp.