Intellectual origins

In 1980, relaxing at his downtown hotel during a meeting in Ottawa, Jean d’Arcy jotted down some ideas about communication. The problem he was attempting to solve was one that experts had long struggled to resolve: how should communication—and, by extension, the RtC—be defined? While Article 19 of the UDHR (1948)—and the subsequent International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966)—focused on information, stating that individuals possessed the freedom ‘to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers’, d’Arcy wanted to go beyond this definition.Footnote ⁶ Information freedoms, he felt, were too focused on mass media to be relevant to a world of new technologies; he saw ‘communication’ as a concept that was wider and deeper, encompassing horizontal, interpersonal interactions not limited to information received and disseminated through mass media. But he, like others, struggled to define the term, as the jottings on Holiday Inn notepaper show. D’Arcy was unhappy with his formulation that communication was a ‘bilateral information exchange’, and likewise with the idea that it constituted ‘the interactive transfer of information and opinion’. Nevertheless, he left untouched the idea that communication was ‘the fundamental social process which enables individuals and communities to exchange information and opinion’.Footnote ⁷ This conceptual confusion would dog the project to formulate the RtC throughout its existence—as would the suspicion of governments. Politicians—including those from d’Arcy’s own native country—proved suspicious of a right to communicate that seemed to demand positive government intervention beyond the negative freedoms guaranteed by Article 19.Footnote ⁸ Once experts began to debate the RtC in the mid-1970s, they not only took it into territory its founder had never envisaged, but also caused alarm among governments who saw the RtC a threat to freedom of information rather than its complement.

Jean Gustave Charles Jules, Baron d’Arcy (1913–83), was an unlikely radical. Born into a family of noble heritage which could trace its military connections back 500 years, d’Arcy’s political consciousness was forged during the Second World War: a war which began with the bitter experience of defeat as a young lieutenant, continued with a brief period disseminating propaganda for the Vichy regime, and ended with d’Arcy joining the Combat movement of Henri Frenay, participating in espionage and other resistance activities.Footnote ⁹ The war proved to be a formative experience, crystallizing a lifelong commitment to the values of peace, democracy, and freedom.Footnote ¹⁰ As d’Arcy progressed through the post-war French bureaucracy, occupying a role as head of programming at the state broadcaster RTF, television became the vehicle for d’Arcy’s pacific ideals. He is widely feted for his role in the creation of Eurovision, the pan-European television network, which was part of d’Arcy’s strategy of using intracontinental programme exchanges, co-productions, and international live broadcasts to bolster European unity.Footnote ¹¹

Having fallen from favour with the new Gaullist leadership, in 1961 d’Arcy became part of the international nomenklatura.Footnote ¹² The RtC emerged from d’Arcy’s decade-long tenure as head of the Television and Audio Division at the United Nations, which gave him a bird’s-eye view of key debates during a period of intense activity in the field of international communications. In particular, the rise of satellite broadcasting posed questions about how to head off US hegemony, the proper balance of commercial and public service interests, how to prevent direct broadcast satellites from becoming a vehicle for propaganda, and how to decolonize global information.Footnote ¹³ Present at numerous UN and UNESCO meetings, d’Arcy argued that satellites offered the possibility of ‘intensifying and increasing contacts and understanding between peoples and cultures’.Footnote ¹⁴ The UN’s Outer Space Treaty (1967), which established foundational legal rules for the space age, came in for particular praise for rendering propaganda futile and making international cooperation the norm. ‘Just as the caravels made it possible to establish the freedom of the seas, and the spacecraft that of space’, wrote d’Arcy, ‘the direct broadcast satellite will ineluctably lead to a new set of laws, a new international pattern founded not on rivalry between sovereign states but on cooperation’.Footnote ¹⁵

Those words come from d’Arcy’s groundbreaking article, published in a special edition of the European Broadcasting Union’s house journal. After a brief introductory paragraph by UN Secretary-General U Thant, the article offers a concise statement of d’Arcy’s beliefs. The basic argument was that new technologies—‘broadcasting satellites, computers, videotape recorders, and wire distribution of sounds and images’—would create new possibilities for information exchange.Footnote ¹⁶ This would bring an end to an era of scarcity in which communication was monopolized by media professionals, and create new possibilities for horizontal, person-to-person, community-to-community communication. This would have profound effects, d’Arcy believed, creating a globalized, peace-loving, ‘mature’ public sphere, which would, in turn, lead to fundamental changes in governance as long as ‘monopolies, be they private or public’ were made to ‘relinquish control under two-pronged attack from space and ground technologies’.Footnote ¹⁷ An RtC—whose precise meaning d’Arcy did not elaborate—was urgently required to prevent states and businesses from co-opting new technologies for their own ends.

The EBU Review article achieved immediate resonance among the communication fraternity. D’Arcy’s personal papers contain evidence of correspondence with UNESCO officials, members of the International Broadcast Institute (IBI), an expert organization of prominent figures in European and North American broadcasting, and a handful of academic researchers. One was Stanley Harms (1928–2004), a Honolulu-based speech communication scholar who took advantage of his position at the East–West Center, a research hub promoting scholarly exchange between the United States and Asia-Pacific regions, to bring the RtC to international attention.Footnote ¹⁸ Having first encountered d’Arcy’s ideas in Summer 1971, Harms saw the RtC as a ‘key concept in the development of human communication’, which he integrated into a supremely ambitious ‘Declaration of Communication Rights for Mankind’: a manifesto that sought to secure communication rights for individuals, communities, and states.Footnote ¹⁹ An advocate of ‘intercultural conversation’, Harms believed that Harold Laswell’s much-cited model of communication (‘Who? Says What? In which channel? To whom? With what effect?’) should be replaced with a non-hierarchical schema in which the roles of sender and receiver would be constantly renegotiated.Footnote ²⁰

The challenge to Laswell’s schema, which had envisaged communication as an instrument of power, was indicative of an environment in which US scholars were seeking to challenge media concentration, secure information freedom, and critique predominant free-flow doctrines. Though neither d’Arcy or Harms referred directly to these debates, they were operating in a context in which libertarian ideas were challenged by authors as diverse as Jerome Barron, who criticized media monopolies and argued that social groups should have the right of ‘access to the press’, and Herbert Schiller, who excoriated US cultural imperialism and its deleterious effects.Footnote ²¹ But the RtC had other, perhaps less expected, sources. Both d’Arcy and Harms gravitated towards future-oriented ideas, ranging from the work of futurologists like Alvin Toffler and Gerald Feinberg, as well as figures of the stature of Marshall McLuhan and Arthur C. Clarke, both of whom d’Arcy considered friends.Footnote ²² Both d’Arcy and Harms took a planetary view of communication: Harms was inspired by the idea of ‘Spaceship Earth’ and was convinced that a comprehensive, long-term plan for humanity was necessary to ‘preserve our communication resources and ourselves from annihilation’.Footnote ²³ D’Arcy, meanwhile, was a committed Catholic who believed that space technology might create an earthly Christian communitas.Footnote ²⁴ His activity was inspired by the writings of the Jesuit priest Teihard de Chardin, who expressed the belief that technology could bring about a collective, planetary consciousness, which he termed the ‘Noosphere’.Footnote ²⁵ In a letter of April 1974, d’Arcy told Harms that the latter’s writings reminded him of Teilhard and argued that the RtC, while a ‘basic right from an international point of view’ was a ‘duty for mankind when seen in the larger perspective of the progressive elaboration of the Noosphere’.Footnote ²⁶

D’Arcy, as his Ottawa jottings suggest, struggled to turn his philosophical commitments into a clear definition. Harms, by working within the framework of existing human rights instruments, proved more successful.Footnote ²⁷ In a position paper drafted in 1978, Harms argued that the RtC should act as an umbrella for a new concept that would reformulate, rather than replace, existing human rights law:

• • a right to assemble, a right to participate, and related association rights;

• • a right to inform, a right to be informed; and related information rights; and,

• • a right to select, a right to privacy; and related cultural evolution rights.Footnote ²⁸

In other words, Harms saw the RtC as a container: it was a right that clarified and guaranteed other rights, many of which had been elaborated in existing documents such as the UDHR. The right to participate would become a crucial component, understood not just as a right of individuals and communities to participate in civic and political life, but also on the level of international relations: were countries deprived of their right to participate by their peripheral position in global networks? Harms’s ‘cultural evolution’ rights, meanwhile, reformulated a Canadian commission’s claim that the RtC should include a right not to communicate.Footnote ²⁹ In Harms’s formulation, this entailed the right to select, understood as a right of individuals and societies to receive only the communications to which they had consented.Footnote ³⁰

The lack of discussion of a putative right to resources can be considered a weakness of Harms’s definition, however. Though technology was central to d’Arcy’s vision, Harms made no mention of any right of access to technologies facilitating horizontal communication, such as Citizen’s Band radio or communications satellites.Footnote ³¹ Such questions would be explored elsewhere—most notably in Canada and Sweden, two countries which displayed enthusiasm for the RtC from an early stage. Since the mid-1960s, Swedish national and local authorities had provided government funding to encourage communication within communities.Footnote ³² In Canada, following a decade of intense discussions about the need to bring domestic legislation up to speed with new technology, a ‘Telecommission’ had been set up in 1969 to establish a basis for a fair and equitable communications policy.Footnote ³³ Its influential final report, Instant World (1971), concluded that the RtC existed as a ‘basic human right’ and that it was an entitlement of ‘all Canadians’.Footnote ³⁴ The two countries’ enthusiasm can be explained through a shared geography as Arctic States whose remote northern settlements, including indigenous communities, were often excluded from communications networks; and by their fear of US dominance: the Telecommission’s chair, Henry Hindley, admitted that Canada had a ‘preoccupation with cultural invasion’ and an ‘immediate vulnerability to US broadcasting’; Sweden’s UNESCO Council, in turn, denounced US ‘mass media imperialism’.Footnote ³⁵ It is little surprise, then, that the two countries worked closely and co-proposed a Working Group on Direct Broadcast Satellites at the UN to counter US influence.Footnote ³⁶

The two countries’ interest in the new right may also be the product of shared social democratic beliefs. In Sweden, there was a widespread belief that corporate mass media traded in values alien to a democratic society. In a speech at the 1974 UNESCO General Conference, Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs Berthil Zachrisson decried a world in which multinational corporations were dominant, individualism, and injustice were rife, and there was little ‘solidarity with the poor and neglected’.Footnote ³⁷ To counter these tendencies, the country’s Social Democratic leadership provided state subsidies to local and independent media, while decentralizing broadcasting and providing facilities to serve local communities.Footnote ³⁸ In the remote northern city of Kiruna, for instance, the government financed a local production studio and set up a cable channel allowing locals to broadcast their own local news.Footnote ³⁹ The Canadian Telecommission, meanwhile, was set up by the country’s social democratic leadership under Pierre Trudeau, and highlighted numerous Canadian initiatives offering possibilities for person-to-person and intra-community communication, such as local cable programming, radio phone-ins, and suicide prevention hotlines.Footnote ⁴⁰

Figures like US social scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool believed such initiatives were sufficient to guarantee the RtC. In an essay published in 1977, he argued that ‘citizen feedback phone and teletype lines, low-cost cable television rental channels, subsidized basic minimum phone service, and subsidized postage rates for print media’, alongside technology facilitating two-way communication in remote areas and the removal of communications taxes and rates, offered a means of achieving the right.Footnote ⁴¹ However, Pool’s essay was resolutely focused on the United States, and ignored the question of how the RtC could be enacted in Global South countries lacking access to satellites or cable television, and where quite different models of communication were the norm. In subsequent debates, demands for resources and respect for traditional modes of communication would invariably accompany discussions of the RtC’s applicability to the Global South.

It remained to be seen, moreover, whether technology was sufficient. Richard Gwyn, one of the authors of the Instant World report, warned of the alienating effects of modern communication and the danger of ‘information overload’, arguing that there was a need to put ‘soul in the system’. Technology, in his view, had to meet human needs, rather than the other way round.Footnote ⁴² But the Telecommission chair, Henry Hindley, a plain-speaking Brit transplanted to Ottawa, found Gwyn’s call for a more human form of communication vacuous, describing his work as ‘peoplecrap’.Footnote ⁴³ While Hindley saw the RtC purely as a matter of plumbing—plugging the right machines into the right places—Gwyn, like d’Arcy and Harms, sought to limit the power of governments and corporations in favour of individuals and communities. This humanistic conception of communication as an activity essential for a fully realized existence gave rise to an idea of the RtC not merely as a matter of technology, but as an ideal encompassing all modes of human life.

The question was whether this expanded vision of communication rights could be moulded into a form capable of overcoming political objections. Such problems seemed unimportant to d’Arcy, who identified as a career bureaucrat and believed that it was improper for public servants to delve into politics.Footnote ⁴⁴ However, this generated a glaring strategic naïveté with ‘the will to get there in the end’ somehow trumping (geo)political and economic interests. In the midst of a Cold War of the airwaves, did d’Arcy truly believe that a UN treaty would render propaganda futile?Footnote ⁴⁵ And if monopolies were the fundamental obstacle on the road to the RtC, d’Arcy could hardly expect governments and corporations to relinquish their privileges without a struggle. While some experts came to discussions with materialist critiques of international communications, such as the work of Herbert Schiller, d’Arcy arrived at the battle armed only with optimism and goodwill. That faith would be sorely tested in the years to come.

UNESCO and solidarity rights

Between 1971 and 1974, d’Arcy and Harms worked tirelessly to bring the RtC to an international audience. D’Arcy exploited his networks at the UN and the IBI, while Harms had the ear of the communications elite through his position at the East–West Center in Honolulu, which attracted scholars of the calibre of Laswell, Daniel Lerner, and Wilbur Schramm.Footnote ⁴⁶ In autumn 1974, when a UNESCO official, Australian media expert Lloyd Sommerlad, became a senior fellow in Honolulu, Harms seized his chance. Sommerlad had learned of the RtC through a 1973 d’Arcy speech and was keen to get the RtC onto the UNESCO agenda. Sommerlad collaborated tirelessly with Harms and others, including Erland Bergman, secretary-general of the Swedish UNESCO Commission.Footnote ⁴⁷ At the 1974 UNESCO General Conference, a biennial meeting in which national delegations discussed the organization’s budget and policies, came the end result: a Swedish amendment submitted to the Communication Commission.Footnote ⁴⁸ The motion passed comfortably, by fifty-one votes to ten, albeit with strong opposition from socialist delegations.Footnote ⁴⁹ At the next General Conference in 1976, the organization’s Medium-Term Plan for 1977–82 earmarked funds for a series of meetings and publications to investigate the concept.Footnote ⁵⁰

It may seem curious that this new human right was adopted by UNESCO, rather than the UN’s Human Rights Committee, but some experts believed that the latter’s debates had become ‘bogged down’ and hoped UNESCO could offer a fresh perspective.Footnote ⁵¹ In 1978, UNESCO’s legal adviser, Karel Vašák, developed his much-discussed idea that there were three ‘generations’ of rights: a first generation of civic and political rights; a second generation of economic, social, and cultural rights; and a third generation of new ‘solidarity’ rights, to which the RtC belonged.Footnote ⁵² At the 1978 General Conference, delegates adopted a Declaration on Race and Racial Prejudice, which included reference to two such solidarity rights: the right to development and the right to be different; UNESCO’s Human Rights and Peace Division would subsequently organize colloquia to discuss solidarity rights—including the RtC—with leading jurists.Footnote ⁵³

Within UNESCO’s Communications Division, enthusiasm for the RtC stemmed from recognition that discussions of global information were deadlocked. Rancour over a stalled international declaration on information had been raging since 1948, and, while the US-backed free-flow philosophy was coming under attack on several fronts, there was little sign of compromise.Footnote ⁵⁴ By the late 1960s, however, UNESCO policies—partly under the influence of a Global South voting majority—had become more critical of developmental ideas, and more open to critiques of US neo-imperialism coming from figures like Schiller.Footnote ⁵⁵ As head of UNESCO’s Free Flow Division, Gunnar Naesselund (1917–97) was well aware that debates about communication were in a rut, telling an audience at the IBI that Article 19 had been ‘dead for 25 years’. He hoped that discussions of the RtC would lead a more holistic debate about communication, proceeding from ‘a basic faith in the potential of human beings’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Communication was not an ‘end in itself’, Naesselund wrote in a subsequent article, but a fundamental ‘element of life’ that would allow individuals and states to set their own goals.Footnote ⁵⁷

UNESCO played a crucial role as a provider of funds, as a source of expertise, and—most importantly—as a space for dialogue. UNESCO staff came to the project with their own interpretations of the right: Lakshmana Rao, for instance, was the author of a work on communication in India steeped in US modernization theory.Footnote ⁵⁸ However, internal documents suggest that officials steered discussions with a light touch and avoided imposing their views, attempting instead to enlist ‘expert’ knowledge to find a path to implementation. The expert meeting was a tried-and-tested format, forged through the bitter experience of Cold War division, of attempting to neutralize political difference through technical knowledge. Such meetings brought together committees ‘consisting of experts appointed in a private capacity’ who were ‘responsible for submitting suggestions or advice to the Organization’ relating to a particular programme.Footnote ⁵⁹

In selecting its experts—who were generally scholars, government officials, broadcasting executives, or journalists—UNESCO officials displayed significant blind spots, however. While UNESCO officials ensured a fairly equal geographical distribution of experts, they tended to favour breadth over depth.Footnote ⁶⁰ Meetings were attended by a small hardcore group, including d’Arcy, alongside an overwhelming majority of newcomers: forty-four of the fifty-eight experts attended only one of the seven meetings, which meant that conversations often went over old ground. A smaller, more dedicated, team of experts might have reached consensus more easily. The organization also appeared uninterested in linking the RtC with existing experiments in participatory communication, many of which involved independent media. This locked discussions into an unproductive binary: state media or corporate media. Nor was there any recognition of a glaring gender bias in the discussion process. ‘Where have all the Women gone???’ asked Filipino activist Ermelina Mondejar, upon seeing a sea of male faces at a meeting in 1979.Footnote ⁶¹ She was right: of fifty-eight participants in UNESCO’s seven seminars, only three were women, and only one—Polish communications scholar Jadwiga Pastecka—played a meaningful role developing the right.Footnote ⁶²

Expert gatherings ostensibly allowed participants to transcend geopolitics. Lakshmana Rao, the Indian communications specialist who coordinated the RtC project between 1977 and 1982, reminded delegates that experts were supposed to ‘speak on their own behalf and not their countries’ or even of the organizations which they may be affiliated with’.Footnote ⁶³ He attributed disagreements to ‘individual differences in the background and thinking of the participants’ rather than nationality; indeed, the expert format produced alliances across ideological boundaries—for example, between d’Arcy and the Yugoslav communications scholar Tomo Martelanc.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, the discursive conventions of UNESCO reports—one of the historian’s main sources for understanding how the RtC developed—artificially intensify the impression of consensus. Written in a protocol-like language which did not assign authorship, such documents emphasized constructive measures while downplaying disagreement. Such documents portray UNESCO as its officials wanted to see it: as a transnational, apolitical project to facilitate the global flow of ideas.

The idea of discussion as a purely technocratic project was little more than a comforting fiction, however. It is fanciful, for one thing, to imagine that nationality was irrelevant: of the experts who attended UNESCO’s expert meetings, eighteen—fully 31 per cent—were directly affiliated to the state. Some came from authoritarian countries, where one would expect experts to reflect their governments’ position, but archival documents suggest that experts from liberal democracies were no less eager to consult with their governments. Paul Sieghart, a British human rights expert who participated in two meetings, was in regular contact with Foreign Office officials. In one phone call, Sieghart gave a detailed account of a meeting in Bucharest and noted that Soviet delegate Boris Tsepov was ‘visibly under instructions from Russian officials’ but ‘willing to go back for fresh instructions when his line was shown to be untenable’.Footnote ⁶⁵

The Right to Communicate as a collective right

In 1978, seventeen experts, alongside six observers, met in the austere Radiohuset in Stockholm for the first of seven UNESCO-sponsored meetings to discuss the RtC.Footnote ⁶⁶ D’Arcy and Harms were among the attendees, alongside individuals who would become key players in the RtC story, such as Goodwin Tutum Anim, director of Ghana Information Services; Argentinian jurist Aldo Armando Cocca; and Desmond Fisher, a reform-minded Catholic who was director of broadcasting development at the Irish broadcaster RTÉ. A restaurant bill that included fifty-seven whiskies, five gins and twenty vodkas between thirty-two attendees suggests a well-oiled meeting but, beneath the bonhomie, UNESCO’s experts struggled with the gargantuan task not only of defining the right, but of agreeing on a roadmap to implementation.Footnote ⁶⁷

What was the ultimate goal of these discussions? In September 1972, Harms wrote to d’Arcy to suggest that achieving national and international recognition of a yet-to-be-written ‘Declaration of Human Rights for Mankind’ might form a suitable ‘long-range goal’—albeit one that could take more than a century to achieve.Footnote ⁶⁸ D’Arcy replied that he was on board, ‘provided we keep in mind the final goal: an amendment to the Universal Declaration’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Desmond Fisher, who would prove to be an important figure in the discussion process, agreed with d’Arcy, seeing the RtC as a concept that helped clarify existing rights.Footnote ⁷⁰ Fisher saw the RtC as the sun at the centre of a solar system of communication rights, orbited by freedom of information, expression, and opinion. These, in turn, were circled by the rights required to guarantee these freedoms, which included freedom of speech, broadcasting independence, and measures against press oligopoly.Footnote ⁷¹

Fisher’s diagram, which was reproduced in several UNESCO reports, offered a minimalist vision of the RtC that clarified existing rights rather than inventing new ones. It was an elegant solution to the tangle of information rights, which ranged from the European Convention on Human Rights to the UN Outer Space Treaty.Footnote ⁷² However, it was opposed by those, including the Filipino minister of information, Francisco Tatad, who worried that such a narrow definition would become ‘exhausted from too much generalization and too little elaboration’.Footnote ⁷³ Keeping the definition open to new ideas was necessary, Tatad felt, if delegates were to reach a definition that united ‘legal, moral, technological’ aspects, while staying attentive to the individual, national, and international dimensions of the right.Footnote ⁷⁴ But the bagginess of ‘communication’—its magnetic capacity to attract new rights and old—showed the pitfalls of this alternative approach. In meetings and reports, experts claimed that the RtC included the right to participate, the right of assembly, the right of association, the right to work, the right to join a trade union, the right to resources, the right to development, the right to health, the right to education, the right to culture, the right to enjoy the benefits of science, the right to entertainment, the right to know, the right to inform, the right to be informed, the right to balanced information, the right to access information sources, the right to co-create information, the right to reply, the right to correct, the right to privacy, the right to disconnect, the right to select, and the right not to communicate. Such a profusion of meanings was unlikely to lead to an elegant new Article 19.

Fisher’s modest schema had the virtue of sidestepping this veritable incitement to discourse, but he had other motives. While d’Arcy and others displayed a consistent belief that the RtC belonged ‘to individuals and to the communities formed by these individuals’, Fisher saw the encroachment of collective rights as dangerous.Footnote ⁷⁵ If collective rights were recognized then ‘the basic assumption on which the rule of law in Western society is posited—that is, the right of the individual against society—would be denied’.Footnote ⁷⁶ The jump from community to collective is telling: Fisher was not thinking of the remote communities aided by Swedish and Canadian policies, but about the Soviet masses. Identifying community rights as collective rights, Fisher claimed that a definition that recognized community rights ignored a ‘yawning east–west political gap’, offering succour to communist governments which limited individual freedom in the name of the common good.Footnote ⁷⁷ The RtC had to be defended from such demands, lest it traduce individual freedom.

Though Fisher raised the spectre of socialist countries abusing the RtC for their own ends, their enthusiasm for the new right was lukewarm at best. Only Yugoslavia, an outlier in the socialist world, was truly taken with the concept, with Tomo Martelanc playing a particularly crucial role flying the flag for Third World aspirations.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Soviet Union, by contrast, had led opposition to the RtC in 1974 and continued to be uncompromising in its response to the new right. While the country was supportive of Third World calls for a new communication order, its experts were hostile to the RtC, with Iurii Kolosov, a legal advisor at the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, one of its most vocal critics.Footnote ⁷⁹ His writings reflect a wider Soviet consensus that international law had no place dictating governments’ actions with regard to their own citizens.Footnote ⁸⁰ In an article for a Soviet legal journal, Kolosov argued that ‘sovereign equality and non-interference in each other’s internal affairs’ was a fundamental principle of international cooperation.Footnote ⁸¹ This principle was on clear display in a paper Kolosov prepared for a crucial meeting in Manila (see later), which claimed that the RtC was being ‘misconstrued as a right to interfere in the domestic affairs of sovereign States’.Footnote ⁸² The RtC’s essence should be ‘the sovereign right of the State to use the channels for the dissemination of mass information, to disseminate information not prohibited by international law, taking into account the lawful interests of other States on whose territory potential recipients of the information are to be found’.Footnote ⁸³ If communist states were to accept the concept, it would have to be on the basis that the state was the ultimate arbiter of the RtC. While this contradicted d’Arcy’s opposition to state monopolies, demands for action to strengthen the state’s right to communicate would gain in force as Global South experts began to evaluate the new right.

The fight for a new world order

Discussions of the RtC took place against a backdrop of Third World anger about global imbalances. Within international organizations, this anger led to demands for greater inclusion in international networks (including, for example, tariff reductions and redistribution of the electromagnetic spectrum); attempts to create alternative structures for news; and protests against a Western-dominated media which misrepresented Third World realities and flooded local markets with Western culture. From the mid-1970s, such complaints increasingly coalesced under the banner of a ‘New World Information and Communication Order’ (NWICO), a movement which originated in discussions within the Non-Aligned Movement, and rapidly worked its way onto UNESCO’s agenda.Footnote ⁸⁴ With G77 countries enjoying a voting majority, the mid-to-late 1970s saw a variety of attempts to enshrine Third World positions in UNESCO documents, including a controversial ‘Mass Media Declaration’, which proclaimed its opposition to racism and apartheid while simultaneously voicing complaints about an unbalanced flow of information.Footnote ⁸⁵

The RtC was not—at least initially—part of these conversations. Though Harms proclaimed his desire for a truly universal, ‘multicultural’ right, the original concept, developed by experts and officials in the Global North, was Western-centric in its assumptions about state–society relations, economic development, and access to technology. Yet it was impossible to conceive of a universal RtC that did not take into account Third World critiques. UNESCO offered an invaluable forum for the RtC’s founders to rethink the right in light of political activism from the South—activism which presented a fundamental challenge to a concept that sought to marginalize state power in favour of untapped energies from below. It should be noted, however, that rather than a single position, there were multiple Global South positions, reflecting the heterogeneity of individual perspectives, and also—because of the dominance of state officials among Global South experts—the centrality of national concerns alongside internationalist statements.

The second of UNESCO’s expert meetings, in Manila in October 1979, was a first attempt to bring the RtC and NWICO into dialogue. The meeting was attended by fourteen delegates, of whom only three had attended the previous meeting (d’Arcy, Martelanc, and Kolosov), with ten experts hailing from the Global South. It was no surprise, then, that the meeting foregrounded the concerns of the ‘developing world’ and referred to NWICO several times, with one participant advocating ‘radical action’ to ‘fundamentally change the existing structure of international communication’.Footnote ⁸⁶ While experts in the North, including d’Arcy, had seen technology as the RtC’s driving force, for the Manila attendees it was a danger. While recognizing that technology, if ‘utilized purposefully’ could benefit the Third World, the final report expressed concern that it threatened to ‘destroy traditional forms of information dissemination and human communication’ and bombard societies with alien Western values.Footnote ⁸⁷ The two-way flow of communication which was so fundamental to the concept became, in the Manila discussions, a threat to the sovereignty of post-colonial states. To prevent such an outcome, the document advocated action to protect local cultural production and traditions alongside structural reforms to rebalance global flows.Footnote ⁸⁸ If the first version of the RtC had been about harnessing new technologies for positive social ends, the Manila document suggested that a truly universal right would have to recognize Third World demands for resources and the need for structural reform to ease access to global networks.

By the time of the Manila meeting, there was growing political momentum in the Global South behind the RtC. A 1976 UNESCO conference in San José, Costa Rica on communication policies in Latin America and the Caribbean became the first official forum to endorse the new concept.Footnote ⁸⁹ The new UNESCO director-general, Amadou Mahtar M’Bow, the first African to head a UN agency, gave the RtC his stamp of approval, though he admitted it was ‘still imperfectly defined’.Footnote ⁹⁰ The conference involved extensive discussion of a working paper, drafted by experts from the region alongside western scholars including Herbert Schiller and British communications expert James Halloran, which introduced readers to a range of grassroots experiments embodying the RtC, including community media projects, neighbourhood libraries, and—in one of the few references to women in the RtC literature—a women-led community project in Tobago which experimented with different media to encourage social inclusion.Footnote ⁹¹

Prominent figures, such as Juan Somavía, president of the Latin American Institute of Transnational Studies in Mexico City, and Mustafa Masmoudi, the Tunisian secretary of state for information, also wrote in favour of the concept.Footnote ⁹² The latter was probably the most well-known, and surely the most controversial, of the advocates for a new communication order, excoriating imbalances in global media flows while simultaneously demanding mandatory codes of ethics for journalists.Footnote ⁹³ Masmoudi participated in a number of discussions of the RtC and frequently discussed the right in print. The RtC was ‘like air or daylight’, he argued in a UNESCO report: ‘everyone should have the same right thereto’.Footnote ⁹⁴ In a document delivered to the UN at the end of 1978, he talked extensively about the RtC, but essentially interpreted it as an extension of NWICO, suggesting that the RtC needed to be redefined to recognize states’ right to the ‘same opportunities to access sources and to participate in the process of communication’.Footnote ⁹⁵

Masmoudi’s intervention was indicative of the direction of travel. As advocates of the RtC attempted to square their original conception with demands from the Third World, experts foregrounded material questions, but in doing so subordinated individual needs to the needs of governments. An indication of this shift is provided by a meeting in Strasbourg in 1981. Co-sponsored by UNESCO and the International Institute of Communication (formerly the International Broadcast Institute), the meeting aimed to build bridges between the RtC and NWICO.Footnote ⁹⁶ The attendees—who included d’Arcy, Harms, and Fisher alongside a handful of officials from the Global South, including Ghana’s Goodwin Anim and the Guyanese minister of information, Christopher Nascimento—lamented a lack of clarity in NWICO’s definition, but identified ample common ground between the two projects. Indeed, delegates concluded that the achievement of the RtC actively ‘require[d]’ NWICO, which would ‘provide the freedom and the means for its exercise’.Footnote ⁹⁷ A list of seven RtC-NWICO ‘principles and practices’ linked RtC concepts, such as the horizontal flow of information, with key NWICO desiderata, including action to balance the global flow of information and the provision of resources.Footnote ⁹⁸

From conversations in Strasbourg and Manila, it is clear that experts in the Global South had transformed the RtC, with reports now discussing the structural and material barriers to communication and the cultural effects of an unbalanced flow of information between countries. However, in contrast to d’Arcy’s original conception, which expressed deep suspicion of the role of the state, governments were now painted as guarantors of communication rights on behalf of their populations. Conversations focused less on rebalancing the relationship between citizen and government, and concentrated instead on the power of communication to serve the needs of the post-colonial developmental state.

The individual’s role was not entirely neglected. In a position paper for the Stockholm meeting, the Ghanian information minister, Goodwin Anim, argued strongly for the centrality of participation to the RtC—in fact, he suggested that the ‘right to participate’ might be a more apt name than the ‘right to communicate’.Footnote ⁹⁹ But participation, in this case, meant more-or-less obligatory involvement in a state-led project to build the nation: it meant ‘joining together to evolve institutions and structures to meet social goals’. In a separate position paper, Andrew Moemeka, a Nigerian communications scholar, concurred with this view, claiming that the form of participation encouraged by the RtC was a collective project to ‘advance national development’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As the report of the African regional meeting in Yaoundé (a counterpart to the San José conference) stated: ‘each citizen should exercise his right to participate in building the nation’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The right to communicate had become a duty.

The Global South’s desire to balance rights and responsibilities meant that discussion of the right to communicate now included demands for curbs on communicators and their messages, with Masmoudi a particularly enthusiastic advocate of regulation. Speaking alongside d’Arcy and Karel Vašák at a UNESCO-organized symposium, he called for a professional code of ethics for journalists; elsewhere, he argued that there should be an international watchdog to monitor and balance the content of dispatches; that states should be allowed to license journalists; and that they should enjoy a right of reply to stories about which they disagreed.Footnote ¹⁰² Such proposals came embedded in seemingly radical language. In San José, for example, Pinochet’s Chile tabled a resolution that attacked global communications inequality and asserted local communities’ right to resources, but foregrounded the state’s right to defend itself from negative headlines.Footnote ¹⁰³ While the right of reply had been discussed in international circles since the late 1940s, self-serving motives were clearly at play for a country whose brutal treatment of political opponents had made international headlines.

Such discussions showed how the idea of an RtC could lend support to those who, in contrast to d’Arcy, saw the state as the guarantor of communication rights. For Canada’s Henry Hindley, this meant that the RtC was a ‘busted flush’: perfectly appropriate for Canada or the United States, but unviable in socialist or Third World countries which often viewed civil liberties as a threat to sovereignty.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ While d’Arcy never publicly expressed any doubts about the direction of travel—indeed, he helped smooth relations between Global North and South during arguments over the Mass Media Declaration—he was critical of the latter’s tendency towards regulation and its disregard for press freedom.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ ‘[W]hat in some places is called “guide lines for the press” is actually a curtailment of press freedom’, wrote d’Arcy in a 1982 letter to an Indian news executive. ‘As supporters of the Right to Communicate, we must oppose such practices.’Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The problem for advocates of the RtC is that this was no longer an ‘internal’ matter of competing philosophies, but a subject of considerable international controversy. By the time of the San José meeting, Western media and NGOs were convinced that the RtC was part of a broader UNESCO project to destroy freedom of information. Outside the meeting, representatives of the World Press Freedom Committee (WPFC), a new US-based campaign group, lobbied the world’s press to take action ‘before the Third World nations stampede through proposals they know will antagonise the free world’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Other media NGOs followed suit: the Brussels-based International Federation of Journalists argued that the RtC was ‘another term to give states the possibility to exercise more influence on mass media’, while figures at the International Press Institute (IPI) in London argued that it would trap media in a ‘straitjacket called the bien commun’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In any case, there was no need for a RtC, IPI chair Max Snijders claimed, since market mechanisms already ensured that media met individual needs.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

But as communications experts were painfully aware, in many post-colonial countries there was no market to speak of: problems of literacy and poverty, combined with a lack of facilities, equipment, or investment capital—not to mention pervasive government interference—made commercial media unviable.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The Strasbourg report argued that the RtC ‘presuppose[d] the availability of adequate facilities and their equitable distribution within and between societies’, which could only be enacted through the NWICO demand for ‘the provision of appropriate mechanisms for the just allocation of resources at the national and international level, including measures for the international transfer of technology’.Footnote ¹¹¹ Few questioned the South’s need for funds, expertise, and technology, but the idea that it could be constituted as a right remained controversial. Experts, including Fisher, were concerned that writing an enforceable right to resources into the RtC threatened the liberal conception of human rights.Footnote ¹¹² His criticisms echoed those of Western jurists, who criticized the Third World-endorsed idea of a ‘right to development’—and collective rights in general—and argued that it represented a ‘radical reconceptualization of human rights’ which was ‘especially dangerous’.Footnote ¹¹³

Rather than reject calls for resources outright, Western delegations at UNESCO sought to untether material questions from the framework of human rights, an approach epitomized by the new ‘International Programme for the Development of Communication’ (IPDC). Initially dubbed a ‘Marshall Plan for communication development’, the programme was floated by the United States as a means of heading off radical Third World demands for resources.Footnote ¹¹⁴ However, Western delegates sought to minimize their contribution amid demands for ‘zero growth’ in the UNESCO budget and fears that a new programme would become a forum for Third World grandstanding.Footnote ¹¹⁵ D’Arcy shared their fears. Working in a diplomatic role as part of the French national UNESCO commission, he played a crucial role in the creation and subsequent operation of the IPDC.Footnote ¹¹⁶ He advocated a management structure that would pay lip-service to Third World demands for control, while allowing Western donors to maintain control over the use of funds.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Instead of a generously budgeted programme, by January 1982, the IPDC’s coffers stood at a pitiful $3.1 million, much of it donated by Third World countries themselves.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Rather than supporting the Global South’s communication rights, the IPDC perpetuated the discredited development politics of the 1960s—this time with far smaller sums and considerably less optimism about the future. By neutralizing the threat of the IPDC and challenging the idea of a right to resources, d’Arcy and Fisher ensured that the RtC would never offer more than what Fraser calls ‘affirmative’ responses to injustice, offering crumbs of reform while leaving underlying structures intact.Footnote ¹¹⁹

Despite the Strasbourg’s meeting’s assertions of harmony between the RtC and NWICO, there remained a deep rift between a Global South approach that envisaged liberation through the state and a Western liberal vision that saw the RtC as an opportunity to unleash individual and community energies—if not against the state, then certainly beyond its control. This explains why d’Arcy and Fisher remained suspicious of Third World manoeuvres, and also why Global South experts preferred to talk about NWICO. For the latter, the RtC failed to bolster their claims for material assistance, while simultaneously putting pressure on governments to respect civil liberties. While a Global South legal perspective is largely absent from the documentation, there is evidence that officials were wary of international legislation that might bind their hands domestically. In Manila, for instance, Burhanuddin Diah, the Indonesian minister of information, argued that the right to communicate across state borders should be regulated by the principle of non-interference in the affairs of sovereign states—a position likely shared by other post-colonial governments reluctant to relinquish control of information.Footnote ¹²⁰ As a result, Global South experts and officials preferred to use the RtC as a rhetorical tool, rather than support a human rights project which constrained governments’ freedom of action.

Western opposition

In September 1985, more than a decade after Sweden first introduced the RtC at UNESCO, members of its communications commission met to decide whether the RtC had reached maturity. Familiar faces were absent from the General Conference in Sofia: there was no Harms, no Fisher, no Martelanc—and no Jean d’Arcy, who had died of a heart attack in January 1983. While privately sceptical of Third World positions, d’Arcy had remained outwardly optimistic and days before his death lauded a new French broadcasting law which declared that ‘audiovisual communication is free’. The same trajectory from freedom of opinion to freedom of communication that France had enjoyed could be achieved internationally, he believed.Footnote ¹²¹ But amid concerted attacks from a range of actors in the Global North, was there sufficient energy and goodwill to carry the project to its conclusion without d’Arcy?

For supporters of the RtC, the debate could not have come at a worse time. In 1985, UNESCO was reeling from a wave of departures, with the US, the UK, and Singapore already out the door and others, including Japan, Canada, and West Germany, also eyeing the exit.Footnote ¹²² The crisis marked the culmination of a decade of Western grievances about UNESCO’s budget, M’Bow’s leadership, and a G77 voting majority which frequently saw the West’s positions voted down. Many complaints centred on UNESCO’s communications policy, which was accused of focusing on abstract statements over concrete practice. Finding phrases to make the Mass Media Declaration palatable to Western governments involved endless meetings and late-night exchanges of telegrams; by 1985, diplomats were far from eager to spend time on the RtC, which they considered to be part of the same agenda.Footnote ¹²³ While France and a few Nordic countries remained supportive, many Western countries were now hostile to the RtC. In private, British diplomats expressed a belief that UNESCO was using it as a Trojan Horse to push through measures linked to NWICO, while West German counterparts suggested that it could be used by socialist states to ‘justify restrictions in transborder communications’.Footnote ¹²⁴ Opposition was strongest in the United States, where Republicans launched an all-out attack: a 1983 report for Congress concluded that the ‘“right” of communication’ [sic] was ‘incompatible with media independence and freedom of expression’.Footnote ¹²⁵

A year before this report, a crucial expert meeting took place in sub-zero Romanian temperatures. The February 1982 meeting was geared towards discussion of international law, with UNESCO hoping that experts would ‘assess the relationship of the Right to Communicate with existing human rights and the legal implications of present national and international instruments’.Footnote ¹²⁶ Present at the meeting were several veterans of the RtC process, including Fisher and Cocca. However, the US intellectual property scholar, Howard Anawalt, dominated proceedings. A newcomer to discussions, Anawalt urged a renewed emphasis on Article 19 freedoms—especially freedom from censorship—and argued that UDHR protections were sufficient to protect communication rights without the need for the RtC.Footnote ¹²⁷ Almost inevitably, Anawalt clashed with Soviet expert Boris Tsepov, a diplomat in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, who made familiar arguments about the primacy of national over international law and argued that the state was the guardian of the RtC.Footnote ¹²⁸ Yet Anawalt’s intransigence surpassed even that of the Soviet representative: while Tsepov eventually came round to a compromise formulation that human rights could be vested in the individual as long as states were party to an international treaty, Anawalt refused to budge; Lakshmana Rao later accused him of ‘driving too hard a bargain’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Reflecting on the Bucharest meeting a couple of weeks later, Rao called the meeting ‘by far the most difficult’ of the RtC meetings he had attended—a fact reflected in the final report, which participants disputed to the very last.Footnote ¹³⁰ Both Rao and Fisher placed the blame on Anawalt, with the latter noting that the ‘introduction of newcomers’ led to a ‘reopening of discussion of points and issues which had already been resolved at earlier meetings’.Footnote ¹³¹

Anawalt’s position was not simply a product of inexperience, however, but reflective of a growing US belief that the RtC threatened hard-won freedoms. Jonas Brendebach has suggested that the US exit from UNESCO was an act of political theatre, designed to demonstrate the country’s dissatisfaction with multilateralism.Footnote ¹³² Indeed, Reaganite unilateralism was fuelled by an influential conservative infrastructure of think tanks and NGOs which claimed that international organizations were a hindrance to US global ambitions.Footnote ¹³³ Though the US exit was clearly a means of disciplining UNESCO, it also stemmed from genuine concerns about UNESCO’s communications and human rights policies. In advance of the US departure, Gregory J. Newell, the assistant secretary of state for international organizations and a hardline critic of UNESCO, convened a committee of ‘wise men’ to monitor UNESCO’s progress in advance of the country’s exit.Footnote ¹³⁴ One was Leonard Marks, a former director of the US Information Agency and latterly an advisor to the World Press Freedom Committee, who argued that UNESCO was continuing to undertake activities that ‘could be considered as a threat to press freedom’.Footnote ¹³⁵ For the United States to rescind its decision, the report demanded the abandonment of research on the RtC which, along with the ideas of access to and participation in communication, was said to be ‘oriented towards collective rights’, while threatening ‘a single normative code for the media and the restriction of journalists’ freedom’.Footnote ¹³⁶

Taking place barely nine months after the US departure, the 1985 General Conference was a singularly inauspicious time for a discussion of the RtC. The director-general’s report had been drafted by figures on the periphery of the discussion process: British jurist Paul Sieghart had attended only a couple of meetings, while Senegalese lawyer Adama Dieng, legal officer for the International Commission of Jurists, and Henryk Sokalski, a diplomat in the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, had been entirely absent from the expert discussions. Their report recognized the lack of a clear definition as a major weakness, but concluded that the development of new communications media made further study desirable.Footnote ¹³⁷ However, the subsequent debate soon became bogged down in the same disagreements as before. While some delegates echoed d’Arcy’s warnings on the danger of monopolies, and agreed that the RtC should be both an individual and collective right, others argued that human rights were individual, and that the main tenets of the RtC were already contained within Article 19. They lamented that the RtC was too often interpreted as the ‘right of states or government-directed corporations to come between the media and their audiences’—a position diametrically opposed to a Global South contingent who called for more resources and spoke in favour of NWICO.Footnote ¹³⁸

‘Many of us who were privileged to work with and learn from Jean d’Arcy … and who knew the positive way in which he envisaged this right, have been surprised at the divisiveness it has sparked’, said one speaker at the meeting, but in the face of such division the best the RtC’s advocates could do was to ask for more time: ‘New rights take some time to be rooted’, argued one speaker, adding that ‘new rights usually upset balances, discomfort established norms and systems and open windows for untried ideas’.Footnote ¹³⁹ But the time for overturning norms was over. One charge levelled at UNESCO by the United States was that its activities were ‘excessively politicised’ and ‘led to sterile debate’; the United States had demanded that the organization cut funding for theoretical discussion and devote more attention to development.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Summing up the debate, Antoni Pasquali of UNESCO’s Communication Division seemed to allude to such criticisms, telling delegates that ‘the time for discussions on major principles … was passing, giving way to the period of practical action’, adding that ‘efforts were currently being made to secure greater consistency between what was said and what was done’.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Such comments made it clear that UNESCO would no longer prioritize the RtC, a fact reflected in the paltry sum—$7,500—awarded to the project. By the next General Conference in 1987, the new director general, Federico Major, pledged to prioritize ‘operational activities’: on-the-ground development projects geared towards concrete improvements in communications capacity.Footnote ¹⁴² There was no place in the new programme for the RtC, a concept which had once carried hopes for a transformation of human relations, but was now an unlamented victim of the UNESCO communication wars.