This report, written by Toby Mendel (senior legal counsel at ARTICLE 19) and published by UNESCO, surveys the relatively recent right to information laws in place in 11 Latin American countries, including Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Peru and Uruguay.Making legal language accessible, the study provides a reading-between-the-lines perspective that highlights both the exemplary aspects of the laws, as well as the areas that require amendments or additions to ensure public interest is prioritised above the interests of governments and corporations.

RtI in Latin America.PDF

Executive Summary of the "Report of the People's Right to Information Assessment 2008" carried out in India by the RTI Assessment & Analysis Group (RaaG) and the National Campaign for People’s Right to Information (NCPRI) and published in July 2009. The goal of this assessment was to ascertain how India’s nascent right to information regime might be further strengthened.

Report.PDF

This article analyzes the three-decade evolution of the right to communicate debates. There are two stages of this global debate: intergovernmental and civil society. Intergovernmental efforts reached an impasse when crippled by cold war pressures and the politicization of the right to communicate. Once the domain of governmental actors, when the right to communicate was no longer on the agenda in intergovernmental platforms, civil society stepped in to promote communication rights. Many non-governmental organizations came together under the umbrella of communication rights. The Communication Rights in the Information Study (CRIS) campaign is investigated as a specific case study of transnational collective action for communication rights since it is a visible example of a global expression of the right to communicate movement.

Global Debates.PDF

Around the world, citizens in local communities are utilising ICTs to underpin the creation of a participatory and democratic vision of the network society. Embedded in the richness and diversity of community practice, a vision of a 'civil network society' is emerging. A society where ICTs are harnessed as tools to improve the quality of life and reflect the diversity of social networks; where people are viewed as citizens, not just as consumers, and where heterogeneity is perceived as a strength rather than a weakness.

Community Practice in the Network Society looks at the broad context in which this is happening, presents case studies of local projects from around the world, and discusses community ICT research methodologies. Not only does it highlight the symbiotic relationship between community ICT practice and research, but it also provides evidence supporting the case for the development of more inclusive and participatory pathways to the network society.

The book consists of two papers: Communication Rights: Human Rights in the Information Society: From Exclusion to Inclusion," and "Access to Information in Human Rights: A Forgotten Concept." The first paper, Communication Rights: Human Rights in the Information Society," analyses communication rights in the context of "three generations of human rights."

This chapter proposes to explore how “informational developments” interact with the societies in which they take place. These developments refer to the growing significance of information products (such as news, advertising, entertainment and scientific data) and information services (such as those provided by the World Wide Web); the increasing volumes of information generated, collected, stored and made available; the essential role of information technology as the backbone of many social services and as the engine of economic productivity; and the input of information processing into transactions in trading and finance. The interactions between informational developments and societies have technological, cultural, political and economic dimensions, for which the international community has established human rights standards. These standards are analysed in the chapter.

The major problem with these standards is the lack of implementation. No effective mechanisms have been established to deal with all the obstacles that hamper the realization of human rights in the field of informational developments. Moreover, current human rights pro-visions focus exclusively on “information” and ignore “communication”. No human rights standard has been adopted to address communication as an interactive process. Communication tends to be seen as the “transfer of messages”. This omission could be remedied by the adoption—as part of the existing human rights standards—of the “human right to communicate”. This right is perceived by its protagonists as more fundamental than the information rights presently accorded by international law. The essence of this right would be based on the observation that communication is a fundamental social process, a basic human need and the foundation of all social organization. The right to communicate should constitute the core of any democratic system.

The chapter concludes by stating that the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) could remind the international community of all that has been achieved already and stress the importance to seriously identify and remove major obstacles to the urgently needed implementation of existing human rights provisions. WSIS could also point out that the essential omission in “human rights for the information society” is the lack of human rights standards for communication as an interactive process. UN Secretary-General Kofi Anan stated the need for the right to communicate very explicitly in his message on World Telecommunication Day (17 May 2003) as he reminded the international community that there were millions of people in the poorest countries who were still excluded from the “right to communicate”, which was increasingly seen as a fundamental human right.

There are three challenges inherent to every right: how to formulate it; how to translate it into policy; how to implement it. This paper deals with the second of these challenges: how to translate a right to communicate into policy. The aim of this paper is to stimulate consideration and discussion of this complex issue. To do so, it looks briefly at two early attempts at moving the right to communicate from concept into policy, one at the international level through Unesco and one at the national level in Canada. It argues that a political strategy must be linked to any policy strategy and concludes with a three-pronged approach to initiate such a process.

This study documents the emergence of the societal right to freedom of the press in the international human rights law of Latin America. Relying on legal research and analysis methodology, this article examines cases fr00.om the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that address press freedom vis-a-vis prior restraints, desacato laws, violent attacks on journalists and mandatory colegio membership for journalists. The study concludes that the societal right to a free press, like the individual right, is a guarantee against governmental intrusion in the free flow of information and ideas necessary in a democracy.

The author examines the right to communicate as a fundamental right of all human beings that is implicitly protected by provisions of the Canadian Constitution that recognize and affirm the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada. The author argues that, as the primary objectives of the constitutional protection of Aboriginal and treaty rights are to preserve, protect, enhance and promote Aboriginal culture and identity and the survival of Aboriginal community, the individual's right to form that community is key. Such a right must be understood as implicitly protected, even though not explicitly enumerated

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The new tools of information and communication play an increasingly important role in many organisations, providing new opportunities and new challenges. The human rights world, for which good quality information is a prime requisite and information management is a vital skill, is equally faced with the opportunities and threats of these tools in promoting and protecting human rights. Human rights organisations have been quick to adopt the Internet and it is having a great number of impacts upon their work, creating change, providing new means of campaigning and challenging abuses of human rights. Yet technology also introduces new barriers to human rights activity: issues of censorship, regulation and control are fundamental to this work.

The design of a human rights-based framework for communication policies in Third World countries is the main focus of this article. This instrument aims to promote the independence of public media, to increase people's access to public means of information and communication, and to ensure that these media are not abused as a vehicle or legitimation of human rights violations. It takes into account the rights and obligations of the four major parties involved: individuals in Third World countries, as the central subjects of development and active participants in and beneficiaries of the development process; formal Third World state representatives; donor governments, as bilateral partners of Third World governments; and the international community. It hopes to achieve this, finally, through a revision of political power structures in Third World countries, a greater impact of donor conditionalities and a better use of the international community's strategic position to promote universal respect for, and observance and protection of, all human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Rapid progress in information technologies has produced an ever-broadening array of choices in information products. At the same time, it has caused historically segmented industries, such as television, telephones, computers, and print media, to converge and compete. The result is a cornucopia of products and potential in communications along with enormous strain on the governmental institutions that use and regulate information technology. The essays in this book provide a broad look at the many ways that information technology relates to issues of governance and public policy. Adjusting regulatory institutions to the new technical realities is a great challenge. Will monopoly power threaten the traditionally regulated areas of telephones and cable television or the software systems that integrate all information technologies into a single system with many competing players? Can traditional approaches to intellectual property rights and control of socially harmful content be applied to the converged information sector? This book sheds light on these issues, and in so doing demonstrates the usefulness of rigorous, multidisciplinary policy analysis in assessing the significance of changing technology.

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