Communication Rights
Encyclopedia
Rationale
Communication is recognised as an essential human need and, therefore, as a basic human right. Without it, no individual or community can exist, or prosper. Communication enables meanings to be exchanged, propels people to act and makes them who and what they are.Communication strengthens human dignity and validates human equality. Communication is both genetically universally inherent to being human but also has a cultural aspect. Thus, individuals are universally born with the ability to learn a language but the language they learn is determined by the culture in which they are born. Consequently, communication is a basic universal right that also recognizes cultural diversity. By recognising, implementing and protecting communication rights, we are recognising, implementing and protecting all other human rights.
History
The concept of the right to communicate began in 1969 with Jean D’Arcy, a pioneer in French and European television in the 1950s and by 1969 Director of the United Nations Radio and Visual Services Division where he was involved in international policy discussions arising out of the recent innovations in satellite global communications. He recognized that the communicaiton rights relating to freedom of expression embodied in the U. N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)adopted in 1948 would need to be re-examined in the context of global, interactive communicaiton between individuals and communities. He called for the need for the recognition of a human right to communicate that would encompass earlier established rights. He thus was the first to link communication and universal human rights. His call was taken up by academics, policy experts, and public servants who evolved into the Right to Communicate Group, the many non-governmental and civil society organisations that made up the Platform for Co-operation on Communication and Democratisation, and the Communication Rights in the Information Society (CRIS) Campaign.The first broad-based debate on media and communication globally, limited mainly to governments, ran for a decade from the mid-1970s. Governments of the South, by then a majority in the UN, began voicing demands in UNESCO
UNESCO
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is a specialized agency of the United Nations...
concerning media concentration, the flow of news, and ‘cultural imperialism
Cultural imperialism
Cultural imperialism is the domination of one culture over another. Cultural imperialism can take the form of a general attitude or an active, formal and deliberate policy, including military action. Economic or technological factors may also play a role...
’. The MacBride Report (1981) studied the problem, articulating a general ‘right to communicate’. The debate was compromised, however, by Cold War rhetoric, and fell apart after the US and the UK pulled out of UNESCO.
The ‘MacBride Report’ became unavailable until the World Association for Christian Communication
World Association for Christian Communication
The World Association for Christian Communication is an international NGO registered as a charity in both Canada and the United Kingdom. It is a worldwide network of ecumenical Christian communicators whose global office is based in Toronto...
(WACC) sponsored its republication in 1988. WACC held the secretariat of the CRIS Campaign 2000-05.
Interest in the right to communicate languished during the 1980s as there was no mass movement to promote it for the simple reason few people had direct experience with interactive communication over global electronic networks. This situation changed dramatically in the 1990s with a cluster of innovations that included the Internet, the World Wide Web, search engines, availability of personal computers, and social networking. As more people participated in interactive communication and the many challenges it raised in regard to such communication rights as free of speech, privacy, and freedom of information, they began to develop a growing consciousness of the importance of such rights to their ability to communicate.
A result of this growing communicative consciousness is a renewed research interest in and political advocacy for a right to communicate (see references). From the 1990s onwards NGOs and activists became increasingly active in a variety of communication issues, from community media, to language rights, to copyright, to Internet provision and free and open source software. These coalesced in a number of umbrella groups tackling inter-related issues from which the pluralistic notion of communication rights began to take shape, this time from the ground up.
Four Pillars of Communication Rights
Each Pillar [of Communication Rights] relates to a different domain of social existence, experience and practice, in which communication is a core activity and performs key functions. The rational for the four [pillars is,] that each involves a relatively autonomous sphere of social action, yet depends on the others for achieving its ultimate goal - they are necessary interlocking blocks in the struggle to achieve communication rights. Action can be coherently pursued under, each, often in collaboration with other social actors concerned with the area more generally; while bridges can and must be built to the other areas if the goal is to be achieved.