Communication Rights and Social Justice

Historical Accounts of Transnational Mobilizations

C. Padovani, A. Calabrese, C. Padovani, A. Calabrese

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137378293
• eBook ISBN: 9781137378309
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Placing struggles for communication rights within the broader context of human rights struggles in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this broad-based collection offers a rich range of illustrations of national, regional and global struggles to define communication rights as essential to human needs and happiness.

Part I

Communication Struggles in a Globalizing Context

Introduction

Part I of this volume outlines the historical background and broad geopolitical context within which social mobilizations around media and information, and communication, have emerged and evolved. These first chapters provide conceptual, theoretical and historical insights, building on a diverse body of disciplinary knowledge as well as on the lively memories of direct experience, making it possible to identify the main actors, issues and venues that characterized the history of communication rights activism in movement.

Cees J. Hamelink (Chapter 1) places the communication rights concept in the longer history of ideas, while Stefania Milan and Claudia Padovani (Chapter 2) offer an overview of how struggles have become transnational over time, taking advantage of political as well as discursive opportunities. Roberto Savio (Chapter 3) proposes a lively narration of what it meant for human rights advocates and journalists to inhabit those opportunities between the 1960s and 1980s – a period when communication and technological evolution was associated with development challenges and practices, as accounted for by Ingela Svedin (Chapter 4). Finally, Marc Raboy and Aysha Mawani (Chapter 5) address an issue that has remained open over recent decades: What is the role of state actors in addressing communication transformations that involve peoples and communities across the planet? How should local and national contexts, cultural and communication needs, and policies be linked to the supranational and global in due consideration of interlinkages and power relations?

1

Communication Rights and the History of Ideas

Cees J. Hamelink

Like other living species, human beings communicate largely in non-verbal ways. They use the language of signs, sounds and gestures. However, in contrast with other species, humans use – for some 10 percent of their communications – the tools of spoken and written language. This distinguishes them from other species as the only animal that speaks in words.

The tool of verbal language created an immensely differentiated communicative capacity. Through its use, human beings were able to develop philosophical reflection, and scientific and technological innovation. However, it also incited fellow humans to commit genocide. The essence of all of this is that verbal language systems made abstract thought possible. Human beings discovered the possibility of thinking about things that they had never seen or experienced.

Early in human history, the idea emerged that in order to maximally profit from this communicative capacity, the freedom of the word should be promoted and protected. Equally, however, the discovery was made that words can be dangerous, that they can kill and that the control of verbal communication is essential to the exercise of power.

Throughout history, communication through words thus became a terrain of contested ideas. Liberatory versus imperial conceptions of communication clashed, preferences for privileged access to communication versus public access collided, and conflicting ideas about transparency versus secrecy of information were forcefully defended. The most engaging struggle, however, was always the tension between the idea that communication should be free and yet that it should be controlled. The essential struggle relating to communication became the confrontation between freedom of thought and mind control; in other words, the battle of the publishers versus the book-burners.

This was not always a meeting on a level playing field, because in many societies the powers that be have opposed the idea of freedom of thought. The ‘power elites’ in various ages exercised censorship in order to protect their interests, because they perceived free thought as dangerous to their authority. The idea that people should be free to think and speak as they wish, and should have access to information and knowledge that they need, was (and is) seen by authoritative intellectual and political elites as undesirable. The philosopher Plato, who had a great disrespect for common people, was convinced that their free speech could mean only trouble.

As Sue Jansen (1991, p. 4) concludes, ‘Censorship is an enduring feature of all human communities.’ The powerful of all ages and societies have widely used the suppression of the freedom to communicate as an instrument to maintain control. Censorship was widely used in the ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek and Roman societies.

In Egypt, the ruling class censored what knowledge could be made available. When the medium of communication in ancient Egypt shifted from stone to papyrus (2700/2600 BC), the scribe became a highly honored magistrate and member of a privileged profession. The art of writing was held in high esteem and the scribe ‘was included in the upper classes of kings, priests, nobles, and generals.’ He became part of the ruling class that monopolized knowledge (Innis, 1972, p. 16).

In classical Athens, Socrates was silenced because of his free speech. By the time of his trial, censorship was very extensive in Greece. There were charges of blasphemy against the philosophers Anaxagoras and Protagoras. And Plato, who – ironically – informed us about Socrates’ commitment to free speech, also proposed that all freedom of discussion should be banned from the ideal society, and that knowledge should be centrally controlled.

In the Roman Empire, Emperor Augustus may have been the first political leader to promote a law that prohibited libellous writing.

In early Christianity, the apostle Paul advised the burning of books written by adversaries (Acts 19:19). The early Catholic Church suppressed several texts that it considered to be a challenge to its power. In particular, the Gnostic texts were targets for suppression and burning. Yet common Roman policy tolerated all religions throughout the empire and did not punish blasphemy. As Emperor Tiberius is reported to have said, ‘If the gods are insulted, let them see to it themselves.’

With the adoption of the Christian faith by Emperor Constantine the Great (313), freedom of religious thought began to be violently suppressed. Heretical thought was punished by cruelty, torture and death. During the Middle Ages, the Church fought a bitter battle against any form of heterodoxy. Heretics – men, women and even children – were hanged and burned. To effectively organize the ruthless suppression of heresy, in 1233 Pope Gregory IX established a special institution of persecution called the Inquisition. In 1493 the Inquisition in Venice issued the first list of books banned by the Church. In 1559 the Index Librorum Prohibitorum was made binding on all Roman Catholics and was administered by the Inquisition.

Copernicus’s (1473–1543) On the Revolution of the Celestial Spheres became famous only after his death, because the book was not published beforehand to avoid the Church’s persecution of him. In 1616 the Church put the book on its index of prohibited books. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) made his Copernican worldview public, but he was made to retract his theories under the threat of torture. The Catholic Church did not stop its efforts to proscribe texts by authors such as Erasmus, Descartes, Rousseau, Voltaire, Newton, Milton, Kant, Spinoza, Pascal, Comte, Freud and Sartre until 1967.

The protagonists of the Reformation were no less interested in censorship than their Catholic opponents. In 16th-century Geneva, John Calvin, who was famous for his extreme intolerance, exercised heavy censorship. Also, theologian Martin Luther had little difficulty in suppressing freedom of thought. He very much opposed the liberty of conscience and held that Anabaptists should be put to the sword. ‘As early as 1525 he invoked the assistance of censorship regulations in Saxony and Brandenberg to suppress the “pernicious doctrines” of the Anabaptists and Zwinglians… Melanchton, Calvin, and Zwingli subsequently enforced censorial controls that were far more restrictive than any instituted by Rome or by Luther’ (Jansen, 1991, p. 53).

Secular powers followed these ecclesiastical examples, issuing their own forms of regulation to control free expression. Emperor Frederick II (1194–1250) issued legislation that popularized burning at the stake as a means of punishing the heresy of free thinkers. In France, King Henry II (1154–1189) declared printing without official permission punishable by death. The official rationale was later greatly inspired by Thomas Hobbes’ reflections in his Leviathan (1651), where he extended state sovereignty to the opinions and persuasions of the governed. The English Regulation of Printing Act was an example of such sovereign control. This licensing law created a system of censorship by issuing licenses for printing and publishing.

Without the freedom to speak, humans would not be considered language-using animals – an idea that supports free communication. Concern about the freedom of information appeared as early as 350 BC, when the Greek statesman and orator Demosthenes described taking away the freedom of expression as one of the greatest calamities for human beings. Also, Socrates reminded his judges of the great importance of free speech and free reflection. Despite a level of intolerance of free thought, philosophical schools such as the Stoics, the Epicureans and the Sceptics developed and claimed a large measure of intellectual freedom.

Roman historian Tacitus (55–116) complimented the Emperor Trajan for the felicitous times when one could freely express whatever one wanted to say.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the heretics claimed their right to free thought and its expression.

John Milton published Areopagitica in 1644 in opposition to the secular suppression of the freedom of expression. In this famous speech to the English Parliament on the liberty of unlicensed printing, Milton claimed: ‘Truth needs no licensing to make her victorious.’ In 1695, the Regulation of Printing Act that he opposed was revoked. Interestingly enough, his plea for the freedom of printing did not apply to Roman Catholics, because he believed that one should not extend principles of tolerance to those who are intolerant.

In Sweden in 1766, an Order on the Freedom of the Printing Press was enacted as formal law, including the rights of access to public information. The oldest catalogue of fundamental rights (human rights and civil rights possessing a higher legal status) is the Virginia Declaration of Rights of 1776, which preceded the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Here the freedom of expression was formulated as a press freedom: ‘That the freedom of the Press is one of the greatest bulwarks of liberty, and never be restrained by despotic governments.’

Following the Anglo-Saxon tradition, the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen) was formulated in 1789. This went beyond the Virginia declaration by stating that the unrestrained communication of thoughts or opinions is one of the most precious rights of man, and that every citizen may speak, write and publish freely, provided that he is responsible for the abuse of this liberty in cases determined by law. In 1791, Article I of the US Bill of Rights stated the famous provision that ‘Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press… ’ (Hamelink, 1994, pp. 150–151).

In the 19th century, legislation on fundamental rights emerged in many countries, and the freedom of the press became a central issue, primarily in the form of the prohibition of censorship. This was reflected in many national constitutions, such as in the Netherlands. Until the 20th century, the concern about freedom of information remained almost exclusively a domestic affair. Interestingly, when the League of Nations focused on the problems of false news and propaganda in the early 20th century, it did not address the protection of freedom of expression.

The 19th-century regulation of international postal and telegraph traffic introduced the freedom of transit, and the free passage of messages, amongst its basic norms and rules. The world’s first international communication conventions (such as the General Postal Union created by the 1874 Treaty of Berne, and the International Telegraph Union founded during the Berne Telegraph Convention of 1858) authorized but restricted the freedom of communication, as states reserved the right to interfere in the cases of threats to state security, violations of national laws, or dangers to public order and morals.

In the 20th century the UNESCO Constitution, adopted in 1945, was the first multilateral charter to reflect the concern for the freedom of information. A special division of ‘free flow of information’ was established in the secretariat in Paris in order to promote the freedom of information.

In 1946 the delegation of the Philippines presented a proposal for a resolution on an international conference concerning issues of the press to the UN General Assembly. This became UNGA Res. 59 (I), which was adopted unanimously in late 1946. According to the resolution, the conference would address the rights, obligations and practices that should be included in the concept of freedom of information. The resolution called the freedom of information ‘the touchstone of all the freedoms to which the United Nations is consecrated,’ describing free speech as ‘the right to gather, transmit and publish news anywhere and everywhere without fetters.’

In 1948 the UN convened an International Conference on the Freedom of Information. Following the conference, one of the articles of the UDHTR was dedicated to the freedom of expression. This became Article 19, which states that ‘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.’ An important observation is that the authors of the article constructed freedom of information along five components. The first is the classical defense of the freedom of expression. The second is the freedom to hold opinions. This provision was formulated as a protection against brainwashing and the forced imposition of a political conviction. The third is the freedom to gather information. This reflected the interests of international news agencies to secure freedom for foreign correspondents. The fourth is the freedom of reception. This was a response to the prohibition of foreign broadcasts during the war. The fifth is the right to impart information and ideas. This recognizes the freedom of distribution in addition to the freedom of expression.

Article 19 became an important guide for later international documents that articulated concerns about freedom of information. Important illustrations are the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (1950), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966), the American Convention on Human Rights (1969) and the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights (1981).

In the late 1960s, Jean D’Arcy introduced to the international agenda the idea that communication is fundamentally interactive (1969). He wrote: ‘The time will come when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights will have to encompass a more extensive right than the right to information… This is the right of men to communicate.’

The motivating force for this new approach was the observation that the provisions in human rights law, such as Article 19 in the UDHR, do not adequately deal with communication as an interactive process. Article 19 addresses one-way processes of seeking, receiving and disseminating information and ideas. It deals with communication as a ‘transfer of messages.’ This reflects an interpretation of communication that has become rather common since Shannon and Weaver (1949) introduced their mathematical theory of communication. Their model described communication as a linear, one-way process. This is, however, a very limited and somewhat misleading conception of communication that ignores the fact that ‘to communicate’ means a process of mutuality, making commonality or creating a community. The word ‘communication’ connotes the dissemination of messages (for example, by the mass media), the consultation of information sources (for example, in libraries or on the World Wide Web), the registration of information (for example, in databases) and the conversations in which people participate. In international human rights law, the conversational mode has received only limited attention.

Proponents of the right to communicate have argued that communication in the interactive sense (as conversation) needs special protective and enabling provisions. Human rights law – in both Article 19 of the UDHR and Article 19 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – covers the fundamental right to freedom of opinion and expression. These articles are undoubtedly an essential basis for forms of public conversational exchanges amongst people, but they do not directly pertain to interactive processes. They protect the freedom of the speaker at Hyde Park Corner to whom no one has to listen and who does not necessarily interact with anyone in his audience. The articles also refer to the freedom of holding opinions. This pertains to one’s personal thoughts but does not bear any necessary relation to communication with others. They also mention the right to seek information and ideas. This provides, amongst other rights, the freedom to gather news. This is very important but does not provide for processes of exchange. The articles also contain the right to receive information and ideas, which is, in principle, also a one-way process. The fact that people can receive whatever information and ideas they want does not imply that they are involved in an interactive process. Finally, it lists the right to impart information an...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I: Communication Struggles in a Globalizing Context
• Part II: Mobilizing Communications: Regional Perspectives and Practices
• Part III: Ongoing Resistance, New Frames and Changing Narratives
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index