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Cees J. Hamelink
Despite promising beginnings, there is still a long way to go in the realisation of the right to communicate. The following article argues that ‘Global civic organizations that represent public interest issues need to mobilize themselves and form alliances with other interested parties for active intervention in the fora of world communication governance.’ This is the fundamental challenge on the communications agenda of the 21st century.
The outer space observer visiting the Earth for a day might easily return with the distinct impression that whatever may be wrong with the human species, it seems to be involved in free, open, global communication in unprecedented speed, volume and with total neglect of times, places, and borders.
A somewhat deeper assessment would however have shown that around the world old and new forms of State and commercial censorship are rampant. They not only threaten the independence of conventional mass media but also the right to communicate through such new channels as the Internet. There is a growing shortage of public spaces where information, opinions and ideas can be freely exchanged and debated. State censorship and providers’ self-censoring of social debate, copyright rules, laws on business defamation, are all hindering political debate and public exchange on socially important matters.
Although many different languages continue to be spoken and most people in the world can only communicate with their fellow-human beings in their mother tongues, ‘English is used in almost 80% of Websites and in the common user interfaces - the graphics and instructions. Yet less than 1 in 10 people worldwide speaks the language’ (UNDP, 1999: 62).
An essential task for those who are concerned about the questionable state of the human right to communicate is to identify and organize forms of implementation that are effective and sustainable. A very encouraging and inspiring concrete example of implementing the right to communicate is the First International Public Hearing on Violations of the People’s Communication Charter that took place early May 1999 at the Hague in The Netherlands.
The theme of the Hearing ‘Languages and Human Rights’ focused on Article 9 of the PCC which claims the people’s right to a diversity of languages. The Hearing was organised in response to the prediction made by language experts that 90% of the world’s languages are in danger of dying out within a century. Control over someone’s language has become one of the primary means of exerting power over other aspects of people’s life. At the end of the 20th century the world’s languages are disappearing faster than ever before in human history. During the Hearing a panel of five independent judges heard witnesses that made cases in support of Creole language, Kurdish language, Sign languages, Bilingual education in California, and Berber language.
Among their recommendations and opinions the judges stated that ‘There is an urgent need for international bodies and national governments to be more energetic in guaranteeing that clauses in international covenants and in the PCC relating to language rights, to elaborate strategies for monitoring violations and for preventive diplomacy.’ The recommendations of the Public Hearing will be put to intergovernmental bodies such as UNESCO and to the national governments involved in the five cases examined by the judges.
The organizers of this first Hearing (the PCC Amsterdam chapter, the World Association for Christian Communication, the Institute of Social Studies and the Organisation of Local Broadcasters in The Netherlands) have agreed to explore the feasibility of holding hearings annually on different articles of the Charter. Eventually these Hearings could develop into a permanent institution for the enforcement of the PCC. This could take the form of an Ombudsoffice for communication and cultural rights. This idea largely follows a recommendation made by the UNESCO World Commission on Culture and Development chaired by Javier Pérez de Cuellar in its 1995 report Our Creative Diversity.
The Commission recommended the drawing up of an International Code of Conduct on Culture and - under the auspices of the UN International Law Commission - the setting up of an ‘International Office of the Ombudsperson for Cultural Rights’ (World Commission, 1995: 282). As the Commission writes, ‘Such an independent, free-standing entity could hear pleas from aggrieved or oppressed individuals or groups, act on their behalf and mediate with governments for the peaceful settlement of disputes. It could fully investigate and document cases, encourage a dialogue between parties and suggest a process of arbitration and negotiated settlement leading to the effective redress of wrongs, including, wherever appropriate, recommendations for legal or legislative remedies as well as compensatory damages’ (Ibid. 283).
The PCC initiative supports this albeit with some hesitation so far as the governmental standing of the new institution is concerned. Full independence from State interests would have to be secured as well as adequate financing. Both are difficult to achieve.
Obviously, an Office that operates from a non-governmental background would have no possibilities for effective remedies in the sense of compensation or other sanctions. But the question is whether this is the most important feature. Amnesty International cannot hand out prison sentences to those who violate human rights. However, its politics of shame and exposure is certainly effective and provides a good deal of protection for victims of human rights violations. Ideally one would like to see the establishment of an institution that is fully independent, receives funding from both governments and industries, and that develops a strong moral authority on the basis of its expertise, its track record and the quality of the people and the organisations that form its constituency. Building this new global institution constitutes one of the most exciting challenges for the 21st century!
The immediate agenda
‘The network society is creating parallel communication systems: one for those with income, education and – literally - connections, giving plentiful information at low cost and high speed; the other for those without connections, blocked by high barriers of time, cost and uncertainty and dependent on outdated information (UNDP, 1999: 63)’. Against the back-drop of this polarization in world communication, the realisation of the right to communicate demands that we urgently address the following five questions:
‘Who pays?’, ‘Who speaks?’, ‘Who listens?’, ‘Who polices?’, and ‘Who cares?’.
‘Who pays?’ It is not so difficult to think of myriad creative programmes to implement human rights in poor countries, but then the question is how will the necessary resources for these programmes be mobilised: by the international community, by the rich nations?
There is a clear and urgent need for infrastructural provisions to facilitate distribution and exchange. Data on the skewed availability of these resources are by now widely disseminated, among others through recent ITU and UNDP reports. It is also sufficiently known that considerable funding is needed to arrange a more equitable world-wide communication infrastructure.
Massive investments are required for the renovation, upgrading and expansion of networks in developing countries, for programmes to transfer knowledge, for training of ICT skills - in particular for women. In 1985 the Maitland Commission estimated that an annual investment of some US $ 12 billion would be needed to achieve its aspiration that early in the 21st century all people in the world should have easy access to a telephone. In 1996, Gautam S. Kaji, managing director of the World Bank, said in a talk to the WTO Ministerial Conference (December 8, 1996), ‘We estimate that telecommunications infrastructure investments in developing countries, which averaged roughly US $ 30 billion over the 1990-1994 period, will need to double over the next five years, in order to implement the necessary upgrades. The magnitude of these investments is clearly beyond what can be financed from tax revenues and internal public sector funding sources. The private sector will need to come in’ (I-Ways, 1996: 32-34).
It can be debated whether the expectation that private funding will create world-wide equity in access to and use of ICT resources is fully justified. It would seem that in any case the international governmental community and national governments of affluent countries should be reminded that solutions are not hindered by a paucity of financial resource but rather by political will. Creating world-wide adequate access to ICT resources should be no problem in a world economy of some US $ 22 trillion income. The core issue is that the expenditures for development assistance represent only US $ 55 billion and thus a mere 0.25% of this income. As the UNDP reports in 1998, ‘Official development aid is now at its lowest since statistics started’ (UNDP, 1998: 37).
If one makes an educated guess as to the funds needed to provide universal access to basic ICT equipment and services, the calculation would have to include basic infrastructural investment costs and recurrent service charges. Adding one billion telephone lines, subsidizing over 600 million households that cannot afford basic telephone charges, providing PCs and access to the Internet for schools, the annual costs for all developing countries - over a period of ten years - could amount to US $ 80 to 100 billion. This should not be an insurmountable level of funding. It represents some 11% of the world’s annual spending on military projects, some 22% of total annual spending on narcotic drugs, and compares to the annual spending on alcoholic drinks in Europe alone (UNDP, 1998).
For a variety of political and economic reasons many donor governments are presently cutting down on their financing of ICT-development. Between 1990 and 1995 multilateral lending for telecommunications decreased from US $ 1,253 million to US $ 967 million. Bilateral aid for telecommunications decreased from US $ 1,259 million in 1990 to US $ 800 million in 1995 (ITU, 1997).
‘Who speaks?’ Even with improved levels of availability, accessibility and affordability, there would not necessarily be egalitarian participation in public dialogues. People have very different information needs and different information interests.
Capacities to retrieve, process, organize and apply information and knowledge are highly unequally distributed across societies and social groups. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1985) has proposed that the position of social actors is not only determined by economic capital, but also by their cultural, social and symbolic capital. Cultural capital is made up of such features and skills as knowledge about wines, fine arts, music and literature, good manners, and mastery of foreign languages. Social capital is based upon the social networks that people develop. Symbolic capital represents social prestige and reputation.
To these forms of capital, the category of ‘information capital’ should be added. This concept embraces the financial capacity to pay for network usage and information services, the technical ability to handle network infrastructures, the intellectual capacity to filter and evaluate information, but also the motivation actively to search for information and the ability to apply information to social situations.
Just like other forms of capital, information capital is unequally distributed across societies. Its more egalitarian distribution would require an extensive programme of education, training and conscientization. To have more ‘surfers’ on the Web does not equate the equal possession of information capital.
The ‘cyberdemocracy’ debate
‘Who listens?’ With more channels and capacities for people to talk, the intriguing question arises as to who would listen to all the global talking. This is particularly relevant in the context of the debates on ‘cyberdemocracy’. A fundamental feature of the egalitarian society is the democratic modality of decision making. At the end of the 20th century most societies pretend to be democratic. At any rate most states call themselves democratic. They do this ‘because rulers of modern states discover that effective government demands the active acquiescence of subject populations in ways that were neither possible nor necessary in pre-modern states’ (Giddens, 1991: 167).
CyberSpace technology offers great chances to give citizens information about public policies and to involve them in the decision-making process. However, is this what governments want? Although governments often claim that general access to public information is essential, they will usually want to draw the lines of what is accessible themselves. Not only should state institutions have to make information physically accessible, the information should also be presented in formats that are intelligible for the average citizen. And, even more importantly, the whole exercise is futile if the citizen’s input is not seriously listened to and reflected in the decision-making.
In many contemporary societies, the democratic structure is critically eroded because those in power govern through arrogance. Citizens can talk however much they want, decisions have already been taken or will be taken irrespective of the citizen’s preferences. There is little reason to believe that a system in which the governors do not listen to those they govern, will fundamentally change once its communication channels are digitalized.
‘Who polices?’ The implementation of human rights, as Hossain (1997: 20) rightly observes requires ‘good governance’. ‘Governments as well as powerful corporations must adhere to respect human rights and be accountable for their conduct measured by human rights standards.’ The serious obstacle here is that increasingly governments are (often voluntarily) losing the regulatory instruments to control the powerful corporations and global governance is increasingly the arena of private business actors. The trade mark of these actors is the refusal to adopt mechanisms for the public accountability of their conduct.
The implementation of the right to communicate requires global governance. As the UNDP 1999 Human Development states, ‘The currently dominant governance institutions (such as the World Trade Organization) hamper this potential since their policy frameworks are guided more by commercial than by public interest considerations. Leaving governance to the market place is not likely to stop social exclusion and marginalization. ...the market alone will make global citizens only of those who can afford it’ (UNDP, 1999: 62).
‘Who cares?’ The democratic nature of a society not only depends upon equality in the distribution of information but also upon the ways in which citizens use the available information. Citizens themselves will also have to be ready actively to participate in public decision-making processes. This participation is wanting in many societies and it is too simple to just blame the failing provision of information. A much more basic problem is low citizen’s interest in politics and the lack of credibility politics has. If people were to choose between the political discourse of the Athenian Agora and the Roman Coliseum (where Christians were devoured by lions) many might indeed prefer the entertainment over the political debate. Even where there are possibilities to access alternative information sources, there is usually only a small minority that actively engages in the search for information. Defence of the public interest needs, however, active intervention by civic coalitions that represent the voices of those whose lives are deeply affected by the quality of the world’s information flows.
Global civic organizations that represent public interest issues need to mobilize themselves and form alliances with other interested parties for active intervention in the fora of world communication governance. Promising beginnings have been made by the various organizations that make up the Platform for Co-operation on Communication and Democratization. The platform that was established in 1995 is at present made up of AMARC, APC, Article 19, Cencos, Cultural Environment Movement, GreenNet, Grupo de los Ocho, IDOC, IFJ, IPAL, International Women’s Tribune Centre, MacBride Round Table, MedTV, One World Online, Panos, People’s Communication Charter, UNDA, Vidéazimut, WACC, WETV, Worldview International Foundation. Members of the platform have agreed to work for the formal recognition of the right to communicate to be recognised. Members also emphasize the need to defend and deepen an open public space for debate and actions that build critical understanding of the ethics of communication, democratic policy and equitable and effective access.
The fundamental challenge, however, is still whether sufficiently large numbers of people can be made aware of how critically communications affects their daily lives and how vitally important it is that they take action. Dealing with this challenge should have top priority on the agenda for the realisation of the right to communicate.
References
Bourdieu, P. (1985), Reprint of Social Space and Genesis of Classes, in: Theory and Society, 14: 723-744
Hossain, K. (1997). Promoting Human Rights in the Global Market Place. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit.
Giddens, A. (1991), The Consequences of Modernity, Oxford, Polity Press.
I-Ways (1996), Digest of Electronic Commerce Policy and Regulation, Fairfax Station, Transnational Data Reporting Service, 19 (2).
UNDP (1998), Human Development Report 1998, New York, Oxford University Press.
UNDP (1999), Human Development Report 1999, New York, Oxford University Press.
World Commission on Culture and Development (1995), Our Creative Diversity, Paris, UNESCO Publishing.
Cees J. Hamelink is Professor of International Communication at the University of Amsterdam and was President of the International Association for Mass Communication Research (IAMCR) 1990-94. He is the author of more than ten books on international communication, culture and technology, including Cultural Autonomy in Global Communications (1983), The Technology Gamble (1988), The Politics of World Communication (1994) and The Ethics of CyberSpace (forthcoming 1999).
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