Internet Press Freedom Conference

Statement by Ronald Koven, European Representative
World Press Freedom Committee

The draft papers for the World Summit on the Information Society describe the Information Society as a world social order -- “a new and higher form of social organization” that would “promote sustainable economic and social development, improve quality of life and alleviate poverty and hunger.” That’s quite a lot of baggage.

But I want to concentrate on one of the central concerns we at the World Press Freedom Committee have over the plans and ideas behind them being seriously considered at the WSIS -- the so-called “Right to Communicate.”

I have been attending and closely following the various regional and world preparatory meetings of WSIS. You can find my analysis of the state of play for the summit in the Working papers booklet WPFC has prepared for this conference.

As far as the WPFC is concerned, the situation is simple. There is already an existing right to communicate.

It is Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the United Nations. It reads:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

Note the prescience of the last phrase -- “through any media and regardless of frontiers.” It is clearly applicable to the new Information and Communication Technologies, such as Internet and Direct Satellite Broadcasting.

The authors of the text written with such foresight were a small drafting group presided by Eleanor Roosevelt, and including René Cassin, one of the most eminent French jurists, and Carlos Romulo, the prestigious Foreign Minister of the Philippines.

The only real problem with Article 19, which is the Gold Standard for Freedom of Expression and Freedom of the Press, is that it is not honored in a good half of the world’s countries. It is time, past time, to put it into practice. We have called for the World Summit on the Information Society to say in its final Declaration that Article 19 should be implemented.

It is puzzling to us that anyone would want to go beyond that. I understand that there are those who consider there are other issues that need to be addressed, like media concentration. But such issues are best handled not with special legislation on the press. There is perfectly good general anti-monopoly legislation that covers the problem. The same is true for other concerns.

Instead of complaining that Article 19 doesn’t “go far enough” on some issue or other, those who want more take the risk of creating a situation in which some unattainable (and not universally recognized) Utopia becomes the enemy of the good.

Just consider how well off the world would be if Article 19 were to be respected and applied all over.

The “Right to Communicate” has a history of more than a quarter of a century. I recall attending a UNESCO consultative meeting in Bucharest in 1982 on the “Right to Communicate,” at the height of the New World Information and Communication Order controversy. It was clear that there were those who wanted to “go beyond” Article 19, which is an individual human right, to create a collective right of groups and nations.

What was involved, at the height of the Cold War, was the right of governments like the Soviet Union to claim time or space in other people’s broadcast or printed press to put across their propaganda.

The ‘Right to Communicate” had many permutations. A Dutch professor of communications, Cees Hamelink, who was one of the chief ideologues of the discredited New World Information and Communication Order, tried to promulgate a “People’s Communication Charter,” incorporating the “Right to Communicate” as a collective right.

The expression sounds good. Who could oppose it? The very first person to broach the idea, in 1969, was the late and regretted Jean d’Arcy of France, who defined it in the most positive ways. But immediately others latched onto it with much less generous ideas. They added in restrictions that could only serve as covers for censorship.

Speaking of satellite broadcasting, d’Arcy had said that everyone would have the right to communicate “after the monopolies, be they private or public, have had to relinquish control under two-pronged attack from space and ground technologies.” Former WPFC Director Dana Bullen has written that, thanks to Internet, “the future that d’Arcy envisioned may, in fact, already have arrived.”

Cees Hamelink recently wrote Again on what a “Right to Communicate” would look like in the winter issue of the quarterly magazine “Media Development” of the World Association for Christian Communication. There, he included:

The right of people to be protected against interference with their privacy by the mass media. Mafia boss Tony Soprano would love that one.

The right of protection against forms of communication that are discriminatory in terms of race, color, sex, language, religion or social origin. So, if you say someone is a “capitalist pig,” or a dangerous fundamentalist religious extremist you could be prosecuted under such a clause. Kurds are already prosecuted in Turkey in effect for statements that discriminate against the Turkish language.

The right to be protected against misleading or distorted information. Robert Mugabe would undoubtedly love to have such an international disposition to cover his already repressive press legislation regime. President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela proposed just such a Pan-American convention against false information, and his Latin American colleagues rejected the idea as an obvious cover up for international censorship.

Hamelink has other even more threatening ideas about what a “Right to Communicate” should include, which he has circulated in a long discussion paper that he says is unfair to criticize because it is just a draft. The drafts of the WSIS documents keep referring to the right to communicate, without telling us exactly what it’s supposed to be.

Incidentally, Hamelink doesn’t seem to like the press much. In the same text, he says, “Much of its content is babbling..., hate speech, advertising blurbs, sound bites or polemical debate...”

Any attempt to redefine a new “right to communicate” is bound to come up with something so complex that, intentionally or not, there will be dispositions open to misuse, such as those I have cited from Hamelink’s proposal.

What is needed is the implementation of Article 19 in the world.

Article 19 is is quoted in the WSIS draft texts, and that is a fine response to the repeated requests of press freedom groups. But this is accompanied in some 50 pages by other statements providing many restrictions.

This tends to bury Article 19. Article 19 should stand alone as a beacon of freedom.

Also, the WSIS texts should specifically say that the press must be free. This is now missing from the drafts.

No new rights are needed. Those who have advocated the “Right to Communicate” define it in terms that would legitimize censorship and other limits on the unrestricted practice of journalism. These advocates depict this “Right to Communicate” as a collective right that supersedes individual human rights and harks back to directly to the same proposals they made under the banner of the “New World Information and Communication Order.”

The Internet in particular has become an original and effective multi-way, pluralistic and interactive channel for communications, precisely because it was allowed to develop without governmental interference. Attempts to control it now and to place it under state surveillance can only stifle a form of media that could allow everyone everywhere to communicate their messages without being restricted by social, political or national boundaries. This new media form makes possible fulfillment of the dream of overcoming the North-South communication gap and so must be encouraged.

Reaffirmation of press freedom in all media should be the basis for any texts adopted by the WSIS. Any such declarations and recommendations for action should flow clearly and directly from the principles embodied in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.