objection. The UN has reaffirmed the rights of journalists to gain access to places and events, the right to nondiscriminatory press accreditation, and the right of journalists not to identify their sources9 – a right that is unprotected in many jurisdictions, including in several US states.
The signing of the covenant in 1966 therefore prohibited restricting access of professionals and denying freedom of movement to foreign media or human rights observers.
Related Universal Rights
Though communication rights were already linked to such rights as the right to culture and education and to copyright in the human rights documents of 1948 and 1966, it was not until the first Geneva Summit (Padovani and Pavan 2006; Corredoira 2007) that these links and the complimentarily of these rights became clearer, especially for an Internet-based society. As I mentioned before, within European doctrine (Desantes Guanter 1974; Sanchez Férriz 1975; Derieux 2010a, 2010b), communication rights contain and complete the “right to freedom of expression” and other, older conceptions of “communication rights” from previous centuries.
The working hypothesis that I propose is to consider the content of communication rights (and their three components of seeking, receiving, and imparting information) as relevant for information relationships in the past and today, after the invention of the Internet.
There is a clear parallel between, on one hand, these three components (Corredoira 2006, 2007) and, on the other hand, the right to culture and education. This parallel can be found in Articles 19 and 27 of the UDHR (see Table 3.1).
Table 3.1 Related universal rights.
| Communication rights | Relevant UDHR article(s) | Dimension of the Geneva Declaration | UDHR articles dealing specifically with the Information Society |
|---|---|---|---|
| SEEK | Art. 19. “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.” | ACCESS/INCLUSION | Art. 21.1. “Universal, ubiquitous, equitable and affordable access to ICT infrastructure and services, constitutes one of the challenges of the Information Society and should be an objective of all stakeholders involved in building it. …” |
| Art. 27.2 “Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.” | CREATE/PRODUCE | 55. “We reaffirm our commitment to the principles of freedom of the press and freedom of information, as well as those of the independence, pluralism and diversity of media, which are essential to the Information Society. Freedom to seek, receive, impart and use information for the creation, accumulation and dissemination of knowledge are important to the Information Society. We call for the responsible use and treatment of information by the media in accordance with the highest ethical and professional standards….” | |
| RECEIVE | Art. 19. “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”. | CONSULT | |
| IMPART | Art. 19. “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.” | SHARE | |
| Art. 27.1. “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” | USE | 53. “The creation, dissemination and preservation of content in diverse languages and formats must be accorded high priority in building an inclusive Information Society…. It is essential to promote the production of and accessibility to all content – educational, … scientific, cultural or recreational—in diverse languages and formats.” |
The UDHR also generously affirms that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits” (Article 27.1).
The Geneva Declaration is not a “new” proclamation of rights. Rather, it is the application of existing principles to the realities of the Internet, based on the idea that access is a right that facilitates other rights. The WSIS is therefore not claiming a new right but is instead launching a public campaign to raise awareness about the challenges to communication rights posed by a globalized society that faces the serious risk of a digital divide. Here, it is appropriate to invoke the ideas of Padovani, Raboy, and d’Arcy mentioned at the beginning of this chapter and that refer to communication rights, concretely through the concept of the right to communicate.
The right to culture is not based on utopian considerations and does not automatically entail free access to the Internet from the home or on mobile phones. And the state has a different role to play when taking on the (philosophical) challenge of ensuring the right to culture or the (practical) challenge of ensuring Internet access. What we might call the “right to universal Internet access,” which is reminiscent of the concept of a universal telephone service discussed a decade ago, has several dimensions: infrastructure, access or connection to the Internet, and access to services. Here, technical universality (access) connects with universality of subjects and of content.
Notes on the Technical Universality of Communication Rights: The Universality of Internet-Based Modes of Expression
We wrote in the Introduction to this volume that the “right to impart and disseminate information” – to use the wording of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – needs to be rethought in the face of the challenges posed by a population that is always connected or hyperconnected to mass media outlets through personal devices such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. A telephone allows a user to follow a TV series, rent a film on YouTube or iTunes, and subscribe to a daily newspaper that will never be delivered to the home in paper form – or even be available in print. The device serves as a communication terminal through which the subscriber can send messages as well as participate and vote in events and debates. This is now the reality in many countries of the world thanks to smartphones and to networked societies, and it should prompt a rethinking of both the law and ethics of communication.
The limits of innovations centered on the mobile phone have not been reached. Innovators are working with the idea of devices or microchips inserted beneath the user’s skin and wearables – even glasses connected to a support or medium that helps us to exercise our communication rights.
The universality of technology and of media refers not only to an individual’s access or mode of connection to media but also to the tangible and intangible systems and media that, in the language of copyright law, “are known today or that will be invented in the future.”10 Such a conceptualization gives universal reach to platforms and media in which creativity is expressed, whether or not those media have yet been invented.
In parallel with a freedom of information that should be universal and neutral relative to the type of platform, copyright should not restrict