FREEDOM OF SPEECH AND LAWYER'S RESPONSIBILITY

Any interference or limitation of the lawyer's freedom of expression may jeopardize or even suppress his ability to provide a high quality professional service for his/her client. On the other hand, lawyer's free expression may jeopardize other essential values in a democratic state: the human dignity or the right to self-image of others, the trust in justice or even the proper functioning of the judicial system. In this paper, we have illustrated this situation of conflict between values through some examples, solved by the European Court of Human Rights, in an attempt to discern, first of all, the logical, juridical and axiological mechanisms by which one of the values "was declared winning" in front of the other, but also the purpose or reason of such a choice.