Volume 11, No 2.

The United Nations at 60

Time to go home?

cees j. hamelink

In many countries today, those who reach the age of 60 finish (voluntarily or involuntarily) their engagement in productive life and resolve to at last enjoy life. Certainly in modern western societies the sixtygenarians are (and often not so kindly) told they are no longer needed and must make way for a younger generation. In any case around the age of 60 it seems time for serious reflection, for in-depth soul-searching, and for some existential choices.

Now that the United Nations system has reached the ‘pensionado’ age should the world community send it into retirement? The position from where I want to start here is that, whatever its many weaknesses and failures may be, the world community cannot send the UN into retirement. There simply is too much unfinished business on its agenda. Some of this business relates specifically to the issues that this journal addresses. I propose to deal with these issues through the following six recommendations.

Recommendation 1

The United Nations General Assembly should initiate the regular monitoring of the state of communication rights in the world.

Communication rights are those human rights — codified in international and regional human rights instruments — that pertain to standards of performance with regard to the provision of information and the functioning of communication processes in society.

Such rights remain for most of the world’s people a vision. They are not a reality on the ground. On the contrary, they are universally violated.

Governments must be constantly reminded that they are legally required under the human rights treaties they have ratified to implement, promote and protect communication rights. Communication rights are the expression of fundamental needs. The satisfaction of these needs requires a strong political will and the allocation of considerable resources. Without the binding commitment to make such resources available, ‘rights talk’ only serves to deepen the global distrust of political institutions.

At the same time, full implementation of communication rights cannot depend only upon governments. Civil society also has a key role to play in terms of advocacy for rights, in terms of monitoring and exposing rights abuse and in terms of educating and popularising rights.

Encouraging and facilitating people to assert these rights through different types of social action, and to use them to realise the enormous potential of both the old and new technologies of media and communication, are vital tasks for all concerned people.

If we want to take the implementation of communication rights seriously we need to follow critically whether and in what ways these rights are respected or violated in countries around the world. Ideally, this would require a regular and worldwide monitoring of the state of the art with respect to communication rights. However, even if global monitoring would be too ambitious a project, a beginning could be made with surveys in countries where small teams of volunteers are willing to contribute.

Evidently, some data are already available and could be collated from such sources as the IFEX, Index on Censorship, Article XIX, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Gender Monitoring Media program, the APG Gender program, and On Line/More Colour in the Media. Putting these existing data together demands the development of a meaningful and coherent analytical framework. The result could be a composite index that focuses on those societal domains where communication rights are especially relevant and in need of a strong defence. These domains are gender, ethnicity, children, arts, journalism and citizenship.

Gender: with 50% of the population societies being female there is great urgency to achieve gender equality of representation and participation in media and advanced ICTs.

Ethnicity: increasingly societies around the world are multi-ethnic. Different ethnic groups have to find ways to co-exist in constructive and peaceful manners. Media offer a dangerous potential for war-mongering but also create a public forum for multi-ethnic dialogue. This has implications for participation, representation and linguistic diversity.

Children: since the 1980s children have been recognised in international law as a subject of human rights law. It is in the interest of future sustainable societies that children’s rights are also realised as communication rights.

The arts: the non-material, spiritual and intellectual backbone of societies consists in the richness of their cultural heritage. Particularly in view of processes of economic globalisation, this needs robust protection and promotion.

Journalism: in emerging information societies this is a key professional activity that needs to be embedded into an environment that facilitates professional independence as well as professional accountability.

Citizenship: at the core of all communication rights are the citizens, who need reinforcement of their basic rights to free speech, access to information and confidentiality of private communication.

In the domain of gender, communication rights have special reference to the rights of women in terms of non-discriminatory representation and full participation in media decision-making.

In the domain of ethnicity, communication rights have special reference to the presence and participation of ethnically diverse groups in the media as well the promotion of the production and dissemination of contents relevant to a variety of ethnic representations.

In the domain of children, communication rights have special reference to the right of the child in terms of free speech, privacy protection, access of information and the production and dissemination of relevant content.

In the domain of the arts, communication rights have special reference to the production and dissemination of a variety of artistic expressions and an intellectual property rights system that benefits all forms of artistic production.

In the domain of journalism, communication rights have special reference to the protection of editorial independence and socially accountable public information provision.

In the domain of citizenship, communication rights have special reference to the protection of the citizen’s right to inform, to receive information about maters of public interest, to the free access to information necessary for the execution of democratic responsibilities, to the protection of the private sphere, and to participation in society’s cultural life.

If the monitoring of such rights is to be used as an advocacy tool, the focus of measurement would be upon issues that can be influenced by policy action. Monitoring over many years would obviously provide an insight into positive versus negative developments and possibly help to identify trends in various directions. The data once collected and analysed would be held by an international clearing house: the Observatory for Communication Rights. Reports could be published as regular publications like the UNDP Human Development report or UNESCO’s reports on culture, knowledge or communication. Making the results of the of monitoring communication rights publicly available would help the critical debate and might have some deterrent effect on countries that score very negatively on communication rights. If the data would indicate patterns of systematic violation of communication rights, they could be presented through international NGOs to various UN human rights committees or to the Special Rapporteur on freedom of information for the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights. In cases where such provisions as the prohibition of incitement to genocide are infringed upon, the International Criminal Court at The Hague would be a possible addressee.

The core weakness of the international human rights regime remains the lack of implementation. For the development of a human rights culture it is essential that societies be constantly reminded of what significance they attach — in concrete socio-political and economic reality — to their formal human rights commitments.

In particular the case of communication rights deserves a permanent monitoring of actual conditions and likely trends. The state of these rights is an essential yardstick for the democratic quality of political systems, for the cultural sustainability of societies, and for the level of human security in the face of rapid technological development.

If it would be possible to develop a reliable, consistent, valid and reusable instrument for the assessment of a country’s performance in the field of communication rights, this would be a crucial tool for human rights advocacy. As Watchirs (2002,
p.728) says:

Evidence from the data, and arguments based on them, should stimulate human rights policymaking and legal reform. Nongovernmental organisations could use the findings to base or increase the impact of their critiques of governments, and as an advocacy tool to lobby for change and focus their activities as part of the epistemic community.

Recommendation 2

The United Nations General Assembly should add the right to communicate to the existing human rights catalogue.

Current international human rights standards cover mainly the dissemination of information, the consultation of information, and the registration of information. Practically all human rights provisions refer to communication as the ‘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 which ignores that in essence ‘to communicate’ refers to a process of sharing, making common or creating a community. Communication is used for the dissemination of messages (such as in the case of the mass media), for the consultation of information sources (like searches in libraries or on the world wide web), for the registration of information (as happens in databases), and for the conversations that people participate in. In international human rights law only provisions on the protection of confidentiality refer — albeit insufficiently — to the fourth pattern: the conversational mode.

In 1969 Jean d’Arcy introduced the right to communicate by writing, ‘the time will come when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) will have to encompass a more extensive right than man’s right to information ... This is the right of men to communicate’ (d’Arcy 1969). The motivating force for this new approach was the observation that the provisions in human rights law such as Article 19 in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 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 in the sense of ‘transfer of messages’.

The discussion on a right to communicate focuses on the conversational mode of communication, and its proponents argue that communication in the sense of conversation or dialogue 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 processes of dialogue among 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 may not engage in interaction with anyone in his audience. The Articles also refer to the freedom to hold opinions: this pertains to opinions inside your head that may serve the communication with yourself but bear not necessarily any relation to communication with others. They mention the right to seek information and ideas: this provides among others for the freedom to gather news. This is highly important, but does not provide for processes of exchange. The Articles also contain the right to receive information and ideas: this is in principle also a one-way process; the fact that I can receive whatever information and ideas I want does not imply I am involved in a communication process. Finally there is the right to impart information and ideas: this refers to a form of dissemination that goes beyond the mere freedom of expression but it does not pertain to interactive processes. In sum, all the provisions in the ‘freedom of information’ Articles in international human rights law address one-way processes of transport, reception, consultation and dissemination, but do not pertain to the two-way process of conversation. Even if the news and entertainment media would have a maximum freedom of expression and would have fullest possible access to information sources, this would not guarantee that people are enabled to participate in societal dialogues.

The emerging reality of global interactive technologies and the expansion of societal networking calls urgently for a shift from the prevailing distribution paradigm to an interaction paradigm. This shift would also require the adaptation of human rights standards to the new reality of interaction.

A key difference between democratic and non-democratic systems is that in democracies the ‘governed’ are heard by the ‘governors’. Democracy is at the core a process of deliberating, it is a discursive process. Without conversation between the electorate and the elected and among the electorate, the democratic ideal is replaced by fascist, bureaucratic or plutocratic systems of government. As a matter of fact we find in today’s politics that such systems have in many countries replaced more democratic arrangements. As the freedom to engage in public and critical political dialogue becomes restricted with such justifications as the ‘war on terrorism’ and ‘national security’, a right to communicate becomes urgently needed in order to expose the deception of pseudo-democracies. If these considerations provide a valid argument for the claim to include a human right to communicate in the human rights catalogue, it needs to be asked whether people can be deprived of the freedom to exercise this right. I would argue this can be the case in the following situations:

Where the confidentiality of the conversational mode is not adequately secured. There are at present in international law and in many national legal systems provisions for the provision of privacy and confidentiality of communications. However, recent events — in particular the ‘war on terrorism’ — have demonstrated that the defence of privacy is easily eroded and concedes its claim to considerations of national security. Much more care should be applied than currently is the case when fundamental rights are suspended. This implies there should be (international) legal guarantees that suspension can only be allowed for purposes that are democratically established, in cases where no other solutions are available, when the suspension is effective relative to the defined purposes, and if any suspension is of temporary duration only.

Where people (individuals or groups) are excluded from the public dialogue. This is, for example, the case whenever deaf people have inadequate access to the use of sign language. This also occurs when there are insufficient language provisions for migrant communities. In these communities people need the linguistic capacity to converse both with the dominant culture of their new homeland and with their own ‘roots’. Exclusion from the public dialogue also affects people in mental institutions and prisons, and in many societies both the elderly and the young.

Where there are no adequate public spaces where the societal dialogue can be conducted. This is increasingly a serious problem in societies where the privatisation ‘fever’ transforms formerly public spaces into privately owned properties. What used to be the public market place has now often become the modern Shopping Mall where private guards control people’s expressions and movements.

Where people are not listened to. This is a very common experience in many so-called democratic societies. Actually, the widespread ignoring of people’s voices has created around the world a tremendous loss of trust in the political system. There is a widespread feeling among the electorates in democracies that it does not matter whatever you say, you will not be heard.

In discussions about the right to communicate often the fear is expressed that expanding the human rights regime with a new right might endanger the existing provisions. However, international law is a living process, it still expands and also the catalogue of human rights has considerably grown over past years to include new rights and freedoms without endangering the basic standards as formulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. New rights are being discussed by the international community, such as the right to development. New rights holders have been introduced, such as children in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. New topics have been addressed, such as biodiversity and cybercrime. There should be no reason why adding the right to communicate would be a problem as long as one leaves the existing framework as is. The last thing that anyone should try to do is to break open the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and amend them. That would be a very dangerous route to go as the international community would today certainly not adopt a document as far-sighted as the Declaration of 1948.

Recommendation 3

The United Nations General Assembly should encourage in the various specialised UN organisations a permanent process of critical self-reflection.

This analysis is needed since repeatedly so many good intentions — solemnly proclaimed in numerous legal and moral instruments — are ignored in actual political practice. This is particularly the case in the field of the international transfer of technology and international support for the development of communication in poor countries.

Part of the problem is that when a UN gathering such as the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS, in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005) adopts laudable resolutions on issues like the ‘global digital divide’ there is no concomitant reflection on the global political-economic framework within which visions and recommendations have to be implemented. However, as long as the rules for world finance and trade are determined by organisations (like the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO) that serve exclusively the interests of the world’s elites and the key international political decisions are taken by such a thoroughly undemocratic institution as the UN General Assembly and its Security Council, it is wishful thinking to believe that future information societies will be inclusive, equitable, transparent and participatory arrangements. All the efforts of civil society organisations — themselves not necessarily representative, democratic and accountable institutions — will not change this. The creation of fundamentally new governance mechanisms will be needed, such as a world parliamentary assembly (Monbiot 2003, p.83; Hamelink 2004, p.133). This will not be an easy and widely popular proposal, but, as the establishment of democratic governance on the national level took a considerable time in most countries, one should not expect that a similar arrangement on the global level could be a rushed job. The Geneva session of the WSIS in December 2003 could have been a platform for serious reflection on the need to create a global political-economic governance framework that would be conducive to the serious implementation of all the promises the world’s politicians have been making to the people of this world. Unfortunately, this was not the case.

Recommendation 4

There is an urgent need to re-examine the international enforcement procedure to ensure the prosecution of violations of cultural rights, which range from the persecution of individuals to ‘ethnic cleansing’.

The Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights has no right to receive complaints from individuals or groups. In its submission to the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights the Committee argued for a formal complaints procedure in stating, ‘As long as the majority of the provisions of the Covenant (and most notably those relating to education, health care, food and nutrition, and housing) are not subject to any detailed jurisprudential scrutiny at the international level, it is most unlikely that they will be subject to such examination at the national level either’. In 1997 the 53rd session of the UN Commission on Human Rights discussed a draft protocol for a complaints procedure and affirmed in a resolution the interest of its members for the draft. This was the first step in the long process towards an optional protocol.

A special problem with the enforcement of economic, social and cultural rights is the standard by which implementation is measured. Article 2.1 of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) requires state parties ‘to take steps, individually and through international assistance and co-operation, especially economic and technical, to the maximum of its available resources, with a view to achieving progressively the full realization of the rights recognized in the present Covenant’. This standard of ‘progressive realisation’ is much more complicated to monitor and less compelling than the requirements the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights imposes on State parties in Article 2.1, ‘Each State Party to the present Covenant undertakes to respect and ensure to all individuals within its territory and subject to its jurisdiction the rights recognised in the present Covenant.’

The measurement of ‘progressive realisation’ demands the collection of comparative, statistical data over time and is complicated by the notion of ‘to the maximum of available resources’. In recent discussions on this issue, a shift from this approach to a ‘violations’ approach has been argued.

Against the argument that cultural right are not ‘justiciable’ (mainly defended by western governments), a growing number of NGOs put pressure on the UN to adopt an optional protocol that would provide an individual right to complain and seek redress.

The opponents of justiciability of cultural rights often use the argument that civil and political rights on the one hand and social, economic and cultural rights on the other hand are fundamentally different. The argument suggests that civil and political rights can be immediately implemented without recourse to material resources whereas the economic, social and cultural rights would need such resources and therefore only be progressively realised!

It can be argued, however, that all human rights require legal protection against forms of (public and private) interference as well as constructive social programs for their realisation and therefore require material resources.

Moreover, to the question of justiciability usually the following criteria are applied:

1. A legal rule is being violated.

2. There is a victim/there are victims of the violation.

3. There is a perpetrator/there are perpetrators.

4. Legal redress is a possible option.

These four criteria are met in the case of cultural rights: 1) there are internationally recognised legal rules that can be violated; 2) people can indeed be harmed if these rules are violated; 3) it can be established in most cases which public or private parties are violating the rules; and 4) many countries have legal provisions in such fields as education and health that are routinely adjudicated in court proceedings.

One must therefore conclude that cultural rights are indeed justiciable!

To strengthen the enforcement of cultural rights a first major step would be the establishment of an Independent Ombuds Office for Cultural Rights.

The inspiration for such an office comes largely from a recommendation made by the UNESCO World Commission on Culture and Development, chaired by Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, 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, p.282). The Commission has stated, ‘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’ (1995, p.283).

For the Ombuds Office to be effective independence from both governmental and business interests would have to be secured as well as adequate financing, both being difficult to achieve. Obviously, an office that operates from a non-governmental background would have few 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, but its ‘politics of shame’ is certainly effective in providing 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, receiving funding from both governments and industries and developing 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.

The Ombuds Office would ideally be supported by a global effort of a non-governmental organisation for the protection of cultural rights. Therefore the proposal made by human rights expert Peter Baehr (1999, p.39) deserves wide support:

The lack of large, active organisations in the field of economic and social rights, that generate reliable information, is a serious deficiency. If a complaints procedure on economic, social and cultural rights were to be adopted, this would call for an active role by NGOs, either by introducing complaints themselves or by providing relevant information. The establishment of an Amnesty International for economic, social and cultural rights is urgently needed.

Recommendation 5

The United Nations General Assembly should develop strategies for democratic global governance.

The United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (referred to above) was in a way an experiment in global democratic governance in the domain of communication, information and cultural issues. There was undoubtedly a very active participation by civil society stakeholders and occasionally there were also exchanges between them and state representatives. The contribution of civil society was essential, even if at no point did the Summit become a genuine multi-stakeholder decision-making forum. Certainly, there was some consultation and exchange between governments and civil society organisations, but a real democratic format did not materialise. This would also have been very undesirable from the viewpoint of many UN member states.

The WSIS process has raised fundamental questions about the realistic possibility of global democracy. The core of the political system is decision-making. It is not ‘deliberation’, as theorists in the school of deliberative democracy tend to suggest. There was – to some extent – shared deliberation during the WSIS process, but there was no shared decision-making.

The measure and quality of democratic arrangements rest upon the question of how much influence citizens have in decisions that affect them, and obviously most, if not all, decisions made by public — and for that matter private — governing bodies affect citizens.

A crucial question for democratic theory is: who is entitled to participate in decision-making, who has the right to decide about a given issue? All those affected? But who are ‘all those affected’ in global matters? Is there a global ‘demos’?

The currently popular multi-stakeholder approach does not resolve this. Who are the legitimate stakeholders in global decision-making? And how could shared decision-making by all those who have a right to make claims on the decision-making process be organised? This seems to imply a massive campaign of informing, conscienticising, mobilising people worldwide and resolving complex problems of representation, legitimacy and accountability.

Nasty questions come up, such as how democratically elected, representative and publicly accountable are those who attend world summits on behalf the world’s people? Global democracy would seem to demand the democratisation of civil society (I borrow this thought from David Held).

Can there be global democracy with the present worldwide democratic deficit on local and national levels? Most of today’s societies are nominally democratic but in fact they are bureaucracies, technocracies, mediacracies or plutocracies. At best they may be pseudo-democracies: liberal representative systems in which citizens have outsourced decision-making power to professionals. ‘For all the talk about politics in Western democratic regimes, it is hard to find in all the daily activities of bureaucratic administration, judicial legislation, executive leadership, and party policymaking anything that resembles citizen engagement in the creation of civic communities and in the forging of public ends’ (Barber 2003, p.47).

In these ‘thin’ democracies people vote – if they do at all – and go home; if it rains they prefer to stay home. For many it is totally unclear why they would participate in a political game that allows them no real contribution to decision-making about society’s values, resources, priorities and futures.

Therefore it can be contested that ‘We live in a democratic age’, as Fareed Zakaria writes in his book The Future of Freedom (2004, p.13). It would seem more realistic to propose that we live in the age of democratic imagination. It can be argued that more than ever before people around the globe are aware of the democratic ideal. They know the imagination of ‘strong’ democracy (Barber), of a perspective that moves away from ‘democracy without citizens’ towards ‘participatory politics’.

The UN would make an immense contribution to this shift by providing a permanent public global forum for reflection on the democratic imagination.

Recommendation 6

The United Nations General Assembly should take the lead towards teaching the world to engage in dialogue.

The forum proposed in Recommendation 5 should not be a place for debate and polemics, but for conversation in the sense of the genuine dialogue. Such conversation is a demanding art which needs to be learned. In many societies people have neither time nor patience for dialogical communication. Dialogues have no short-term and certain outcome. This conflicts with the spirit of modern achievement-oriented societies. Moreover, the mass media are not particularly helpful in teaching people the art of conversation. Much of their content is babbling (endless talking without saying anything), hate speech, advertising blurbs, sound bites or polemical debate. The requirements for a meaningful dialogue begin with the need for the internal dialogue. This implies that all participants question their own judgments and assumptions. The critical investigation of our own assumptions is however a major challenge as we are often ignorant about our basic assumptions. Assumptions are the mental maps that we tend to follow uncritically. We all have different and often conflicting assumptions, and certainly so when we come from different cultures. Equally difficult is the suspension of judgment, since we are strongly attached to our opinions and assessments and prefer them to uncertainties. Dialogue also requires the capacity to listen and to be silent. Learning the language of listening is very hard in societies that are increasingly influenced by visual cultures, as listening demands an ear-centred culture. The mass media offer ‘talk shows’, no ‘listen shows’. The dialogue can only take place where silence is respected. This borders on the impossible in modern societies where talking never seems to stop and where every void needs to be filled with noise.

In sum, dialogue is an extremely difficult form of speech that requires learning. The essence of dialogue could and should be taught in the early stages of people’s lives in school, at home, and through the media.

The UN would make a difference if its specialised organisations (such as UNESCO) designed a worldwide educational campaign plus the needed learning materials for schools around the world to teach children how to engage in dialogue.

This project, ‘Kids in Dialogue’, concludes my set of six recommendations. In a way it forms the essence of the UN agenda for the coming 60 years. If the UN were to fail at all its other projects but the world community were to manage to get kids worldwide to listen to each other, it would make unprecedented progress towards the realisation of its professed ideal of a peaceful, compassionate and caring planet.

Dr Cees J. Hamelink is Professor of International Communication at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He was also the President of the International Association for Mass Communication Research. He has worked in Dutch broadcasting and in a number of international organisations. He has lectured in universities around the world and has published 12 books on communication, culture and technology. His research interests focus on world communication and human rights issues. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Gazette: The International Journal for Communication Studies.

References

Baehr, P. (1999) Human Rights: Universality in Practice, Basingstoke, MacMillan.

Barber, B.R. (1984, 2003) Strong Democracy, Berkeley: University of California Press.

d’Arcy, J. (1969) ‘Direct broadcast satellite and the right to communicate’, EBU-Review, 118, pp.14-18.

Hamelink, C.J. (2004) Human Rights for Communicators, Cresskill: Hampton Press.

Monbiot, G. (2003) The Age of Consent, London: Flamingo.

Shannon, C. & Weaver, W. (1949) The Mathematical Theory of Communication, Urbana: The University of Illinois Press.

Watchirs, H. (2002) ‘Review of methodologies measuring human rights implementation’, Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 30(4), pp.716-733.

World Commission on Culture and Development (1995) Our Creative Diversity, Paris: UNESCO.

Zakaria, F. (2004) The Future of Freedom, New York: W.W. Norton.