When Jean d'Arcy announced in 1969 that '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 man to communicate', 1 he was launching an idea ahead of its time. He realised that the right to information enshrined in Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not sufficient in itself to guarantee to human beings the freedom to communicate with each other in ways that their very human nature required.

It may seem that the difference between the right enshrined in the UDHR and the new right adumbrated by d'Arcy is so thin as to be non-existent. Article 19 of the Declaration stated firmly 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.' What more, the critic might ask, is required?

d'Arcy's answer was best expressed in the very last piece he wrote, a preface he contributed to a book2 published in 1983, a few days before his death and 14 years after he first unveiled his idea. In it, he stated that most analyses of the modern communications revolution have been superficial, evaluating it only in terms of the past and in terms of quantitative, not qualitative, change. He wanted the modern mass media mentality of 'a unilateral, vertical flow of non-diversified information', which was not real communication, to be replaced by an interactive form of communication, based on an ethical approach which would re-establish real communication among human beings. He saw the right to communicate as the apex of an ascending progression of liberties - freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom to communicate. For him the proposed new right was a means of creating a new world order of communication, not as substituting for existing freedoms but 'rather (as a way) to crown the whole fabric of "intellectual" freedoms with a new one that encompasses all the others.'